Design aided by visual displays: A cognitive approach

The use of visual displays is seen as a supportive tool for solving design problems. Throughout the design process, and particularly in the early stages of the process, designers are exposed to vast collections of visual displays. These are external representations, i.e., pictures, diagrams, or sketches, which provide designers with helpful explicit and non-explicit references. Despite the importance of this pictorial material, only a small number of researchers have dealt with the spontaneous use of visual displays as an aid in design problem solving when no instruction to use analogy is given. Furthermore, no studies have been conducted to examine whether visual displays play a more significant role in solving ill-defined or well-defined design problems. The main goal of this work is to empirically research the use of visual displays in these two problem contexts by studying the design process of groups of designers with different levels of expertise. Findings showed that both experts and novices profited from the use of visual displays in ill-defined design problem solving, resulting in a significant enhancement of the quality of design solutions. Additional results showed that visual displays did aid experts, but not novices, to improve their performance in solving well-defined design problems. These findings may have consequences for design education. It is suggested that practicing with a large number of within-domain visual displays (which belong to the same or very close realm of the problem) and a large collection of between-domain visual sources (which belong to a different or remote realm of the problem) can help designers in general, and novices in particular, to spontaneously retrieve meaningful information and to enhance their design abilities.