References to Past Designs
References to Past Designs
Engineering Design Centre, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
School of Computing, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Department of Design and Innovation, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
Proceedings of Studying Designers '05
Aix-en-Provence, France: Key Centre for Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, October 2005
ABSTRACT. Designing by adaptation is almost invariably a dominant feature of designing, and references to past designs are ubiquitous in design discourse. Object references serve as indices into designers' stocks of design concepts, in which memories for concrete embodiments and exemplars are tightly bound to solution principles. Thinking and talking by reference to past designs serves as a way to reduce the overwhelming complexity of complex design tasks by enabling designers to use parsimonious mental representations to which details can be added as needed. However object references can be ambiguous, and import more of the past design than is intended or may be desirable.
KEYWORDS. Engineering design, communication, design cognition, adaptation, analogy, complexity.
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Claudia Eckert
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Martin Stacey
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Prof. Chris Earl
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