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Design space is a common abstraction in design research used in the investigation of design cognition. Although its usefulness has been alleged and has contributed to the knowledge about designing, characteristics and properties of design spaces and how they change while designing are underexplored. Creativity has been recognized as an essential skill for changing the design space from constrained to open spaces. We analyzed the brain activity of designers while performing constrained and open design tasks. This study investigates the neurophysiological activations of professional mechanical engineers and industrial designers in two prototypical design tasks, a problem-solving constrained layout task and an open design sketching task. The analysis focused on comparing the neurophysiological activations of the cognitive demand in three stages of categorical similarity of designing in constrained and open design spaces. Results indicate significant differences of frequency bands activations between stages of the design spaces across and between domains. In particular, the stage of reflecting evoked visual imagination and associative reasoning modes and revealed significant differences in beta bands from the problem-solving stage leading to expanded activation in the sketching stage, which translates in higher activation in the open design task with significant differences in upper alpha and beta bands. We propose the neurophysiological activations as a measure of the pliability of design spaces. 

Abstract This paper presents results from an experiment using electroencephalography to measure neurophysiological activations of mechanical engineers and industrial designers when designing and problem-solving. In this study, we adopted and then extended the tasks described in a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging study reported in the literature. The block experiment consists of a sequence of three tasks: problem-solving, basic design and open design using a physical interface. The block is preceded by a familiarizing pre-task and then extended to a fourth open design task using free-hand sketching. This paper presents the neurophysiological results from 36 experimental sessions of mechanical engineers and industrial designers. Results indicate significant differences in activations between the problem-solving and the open design tasks. The paper focuses on the two prototypical tasks of problem-solving layout and open design sketching and presents results for both aggregate and temporal activations across participants within each domain and across domains.