Preliminary Study of Cognitive Model of Designer's Creativity by Using Formal Protocol Analysis

摘要

Protocol analysis is an important approach to studying designer's thinking process and problem-solving behaviours. Although protocol analysis has been used in a lot of research to understand designer's cognitive activities in the design process, a systematic procedure is needed that can be used across different experiments. This paper proposes a protocol analysis study based on the concept of design state. A design process is composed of a series of design states. An experiment is conducted to collect protocol data about a product design, from which design states are extracted. The preliminary analysis of the protocol data shows that a designer generally considers more environment components and their deeper relationships in delivering a key concept.