MMforTED: A Cognitive Tool Fostering the Acquisition of Conceptual Knowledge about Design Products

The work described in this paper deals with conceptual understanding of design products. A working hypothesis is that the comprehension of something by someone is strongly related to the capability of the subject to build and use multiple representations of the thing under consideration and to explicitly consider their characteristics and their reciprocal dependencies in explanation and problem solving. A cognitive tool called MMforTED has been developed to foster the acquisition of several conceptualisations (ontologies) that can be used to represent and inquiry about artefacts from different perspectives. The system exploits an instructional environment implemented by an electronic hypertext, that enables users to browse through a network of models of several devices. Browsing through the network of models is accompanied by a simultaneous change of perspective. Because of the particular organisation of domain knowledge we have adopted, this amounts to exercising a well defined knowledge transmutation (e.g. conceptual abstraction, generalisation, reduction, approximation and aggregation or their inverses). The ability to explore a situation from different conceptual perspectives is considered fundamental for problem setting and design development.