Variants in Design Cognition

Publisher Summary This chapter is about cognitive models of designers and how these models depict different design professions. In different fields of design, cognitive processes have both similarities and differences. Some of the notable differences that distinguish architectural design from other design fields are rich representations, indiscriminate use of inventive strategies, nonstandard problem composition schema, and strategies of complexity management. In some respects the field of cognitive psychology and even the entire domain of empirical research is about recognizing predictability of measurable events. One way of achieving this is to find the conditional invariants among all of the variables that are of interest. The conditions of such an inquiry are represented by the independent variables. Studies of architectural cognition concern themselves with a few overarching issues: representation, strategic behavior, and innovation. Strategic behavior subsumes issues such as search, problem restructuring, and process management. The last category, innovation, can be seen as a subset of strategic behavior as well.

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