DESCRIPTION OF A WEARABLE ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY + FUNCTIONAL NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY (EEG+FNIRS) FOR IN-SITU EXPERIMENTS ON DESIGN COGNITION

We developed a wearable experimental sensor setup featuring multimodal EEG+fNIRS neuroimaging data capture applicable for in situ experiments at a lower financial threshold. Consistent application of a good protocol and procedure for sensor application and signal quality control is crucial for researchers to obtain valid data. This paper provides an exhaustive description of the sensor setup, the data synchronization process, procedure for sensor application, and signal quality control. Potential design cognition experiments with the proposed EEG+fNIRS are also described. In summary, the setup is mobile and provides multimodal neuroimaging data of high quality. We encourage the design community to take advantage of the setup and adapt it to new experimental setups in situ.

The Influence of Process Management: Uncovering the Impact of Real-Time Managerial Interventions via a Topic Modeling Approach

Computationally studying team discourse can provide valuable, real-time insights into the state of design teams and design cognition during problem-solving. The particular experimental design, adopted from previous work by the authors, places one of the design team conditions under the guidance of a human process manager. In that work, teams under this process management outperformed the unmanaged teams in terms of their design performance. This opens the opportunity to not only model design discourse during problem solving, but more critically, to explore process manager interventions and their impact on design cognition. Utilizing this experimental framework, a topic model is trained on the discourse of human designers of both managed and unmanaged teams collaboratively solving a conceptual engineering design task. Results show that the two team conditions significantly differ in a number of the extracted topics, and in particular, those topics that most pertain to the manager interventions. A dynamic look during the design process reveals that the largest differences between the managed and unmanaged teams occur during the latter half of problem-solving. Furthermore, a before and after analysis of the topic-motivated interventions reveals that the process manager interventions significantly shift the topic mixture of the team members’ discourse immediately after intervening. Taken together, these results from this work not only corroborate the effect of the process manager interventions on design team discourse and cognition but provide promise for the computational detection and facilitation of design interventions based on real-time, discourse data.

Induction of cross-functional department to avoid design mis-match

“Design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by whichdesign concepts (proposals for new products, buildings, machines, etc.) are developed. Many ofthe key concepts and aspects of design thinking have been identified through studies, acrossdifferent design domains, of design cognition and design activity in both laboratory and naturalcontexts.Design thinking is also associated with prescriptions for the innovation of products and serviceswithin business and social contexts. Some of these prescriptions have been criticized foroversimplifying the design process and trivializing the role of technical knowledge and skills”