Conference Agenda

This research examines the emotional experiences of design students as they progress through a design project. The study presents how different emotions manifest themselves in the students' design processes, offering insights into whether the students' design experience is ‘pleasurable’ or otherwise, and beyond this, the spectrum of emotions that design students experience overall. Findings reveal a common positive emotional experience amongst students despite their very different backgrounds and cultures. The initial results show that positive emotions can be generated by the design project topic, which in turn has an important impact on the design process and the student’s performance. The research suggests that the emotional aspect should be considered and improved as an influential factor in the design process. Also, exploring various emotions should be investigated in more detail in studies to enhance the design education experiences that support students' emotional well-being while designing.

This paper reports the results of a study examining the co-evolution of design situations, problems, and solutions. The research method is a longitudinal study tracking the creative problem-solving processes of 4 MSc student design teams on an industrial design project. The data includes observations, interviews, field notes, and documents. Visual mapping and temporal bracketing analysis tech-niques reveal insights into the teams' design processes. The results provide evidence that integrating effectuation enabled some teams to pivot their projects by co-evolving the situation, problem, and solution spaces simultaneously. This finding suggests designers can shape situations through effectuation, rather than just passively respond to environmental cues. These exploratory results indicate the potential value of expanding design theory to consider triadic co-evolution of situation, problem, and solution. The implications highlight opportunities for design education to cultivate designer entrepreneurs skilled in strategic pivoting through situation-problem-solution co-evolution.

This paper provides the first systematic overview of how existing research

has studied the temporal aspects of design ideas. Reviewing a corpus of research literature on design ideas, we contribute an overview of prevailing methodological approaches for studying design ideas as they emerge and evolve over time. This includes an examination of key correlations between methodological aspects such as length of study, length of object of study, methods, and data collection types. We find that prior studies a) typically examine the development of design ideas during short sessions, b) often use controlled experiment setups, and c) rarely explore the relationship between

initial design ideas and design process outcomes. On this basis, we argue that current research approaches should be supplemented with new methods that address a) the temporal microscale to better understand the emergence of ideas, and b) the macroscale to illuminate how creative design ideas evolve beyond initial ideation sessions.

Designers address complex and even wicked problems, which requires them to deal with high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, requiring high levels of mental effort. The cognitive load of designing is thus likely to affect design behaviours, activities and method use. However, the nature of design work presents a challenge in applying existing theory on cognitive load to explain and predict design behaviour. Especially designers' tendency to expand the design space to increase creative potential seems to fall outside the current theories on cognitive load. Following recent calls for theory-building within design, this paper outlines a conceptual framework mapping the relationship between cognitive load and the process of framing and reframing. We examine this dynamic between cognitive load and design by drawing upon theories rooted in cognitive science and information processing. Through a narrative review and conceptual modelling, we propose a model suggesting that cognitive load can be managed.

In the decades since the establishment of design research, efforts to identify the nature of design knowledge have repeatedly returned to the question of design’s relationship to science. The resulting debate is often framed by the opposing tenets of positivism and constructivism, and this gap continues to characterize research across the discipline. This paper challenges the paradigmatic divide between cognition and construction through an examination of practice-led design research and, more specifically, a redefinition of the designer-maker. It presents perceptual space as an active, multimodal medium where cognition and construction emerge simultaneously, as evidenced by the work of the designer-maker. This in turn supports a necessary evolution in design thinking: through the lens of making, design thinking is design doing, demonstrating the interconnectedness of practice-led design research, craft knowledge, and material-driven design, as well as their significance for the broader discipline.