Practices in Design Concept Selection as Distributed Cognition

Abstract:

A study was conducted of the practices that engineering designers had learned from experience to apply during the search for, and implementation of, new solution concepts. Each of 36 practices was analysed in terms of the goal it was directed to, and how it distributed cognition beyond the mental world of the designer. The results suggest that designers distribute cognition over their environments in a wide variety of ways which are not restricted, for instance, to using design tools. They also suggest that designers learn these practices in the context of specific experiences, probably by trial and error or social observation rather than means–end analysis. All but two of the practices involved distributed cognition of some kind, but there were no cases where this distribution involved ceding executive control to the environment.