Coglunch - December 5, 2002
"Perceiving, Comprehending and Measuring Design Activity
through the Questions Asked while Designing"
Ozgur Eris, Ph.D.
Center for Design Research, Mechanical Engineering, Stanford
Designing is question intensive. However, our understanding of what
designers accomplish by asking questions is rather limited. The
research I will present in this talk treats question asking while
designing as a process, and examines its key aspects. The theoretical
part of the research involves the development of a taxonomy of
questions asked while designing. The contribution of the
taxonomy--apart from proving to be a comprehensive analysis
framework--is its ability to differentiate between Deep Reasoning
Questions (DRQs), and Generative Design Questions (GDQs).
The empirical part of the research involves designing and conducting
experiments to test hypotheses generated from field observations. The
more significant hypotheses postulate relationships between question
asking processes of teams and their design processes, and between
their combined DRQ+GDQ asking rates and performance. Both hypotheses
were verified. The findings also demonstrated DRQ+GDQ utilization to
be a mechanism designers rely on for managing divergent and convergent
modes of thinking. Special consideration was given to laying out the
foundations of a unified design theory, which integrates the findings
on question asking with existing understandings on decision making in
design contexts.
Last modified: Tue Feb 28 11:26:25 PST 2006 by emma@csli.stanford.edu