Browsing by Subject "designajattelu"

There is a persistent belief among design scholars that design and science are fundamentally different activities. While there are historical reasons for this, the academic literature surrounding both design and scientific cognition does not fully support this notion. Against this background, the aim of this thesis is to examine how designers think while designing and the ways in which design thinking may resemble scientific thinking. For this study, verbal protocol analysis was chosen as the method. Five experienced architects were asked to perform a design task for approximately an hour, and think aloud concurrently while designing. Their verbal output was then transcribed and coded inductively, and analyzed using both the video and verbal data in parallel without directly utilizing any existing coding scheme or framework. Subjects used basic sketching tools during the sessions, which were conducted remotely over video conferencing software due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. After multiple iterations of inductively coding the data, behavioral patterns consisting of three main activities were identified: framing (mentally defining the boundaries of a specific topic of focus), creation (generating and implementing ideas), and evaluation (evaluating previous designs). These patterns, or design activity sequences, formed the basis for the design activity model (DAM) that was developed and used in this study. Five different sequences were identified: full loops, extensions, partial loops, reverse loops, and parallel sequences. Subjects tended to start and end any design action with framing, which is why these sequences are called loops. They varied in duration but were generally short, ranging from a few seconds to a minute or two. On average, subjects would perform roughly two sequences per minute. These, however, tended not to be evenly distributed over the entire duration of the design task. The cognitive activities of the subjects were also contrasted with cognitive activities found in science, including deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning, analogies, categorization, causal reasoning, distributed reasoning, and hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Many similarities were identified, but not all of them could be observed directly from the data and had to be inferred from the context, as subjects did not always verbally express what their exact reasoning patterns were. The empirical analysis suggests that designers utilize specific sequences of actions while designing. The study suggests, albeit not conclusively, that there are similarities between design and scientific thinking, which is in contrast to the popular belief among design scholars that they are fundamentally different. To complement this study, future avenues of research are suggested. An additional contribution of this study is the DAM itself and its coding scheme.