Kansei Information Processes in Early Design: Design Cognition and Computation - Emotional Engineering - page 54

1 Introduction
Designers apply a more or less formalized awareness process about design trends.
This goes from a simple observation in their everyday life to the regular reading of
magazines and the continuous consultation of web sites. Inspiration sources play a
major role in design in order to de ! ne the context, stimulate the idea generation by
analogical reasoning, and structure the mental representation in accordance with
consumer's values and lifestyles. From a study of the cognitive activity of the
designers in the inspiration-information seeking phase, we formalized a theoretical
model linked to this activity which was de ! ned and validated in an operational
context [ 1 - 3 ] . This model describes the initial steps of the design process, where the
designers soak up verbal and visual codes in order to transfer them in the generation
of new concepts. This process is more or less conscious for designers. The selective
process they use in early design is based on emotional, aesthetical, or values linked
features. It also involves the freshness of images content.
This chapter is composed of the following sections: Sects. 2 - 6 .
2 Theoretical Background
2.1 Formalization of the Early Design Process
Research advances that were widely developed in design science and other disci-
plines such as cognitive psychology in the 1990s apply mainly to the individual
sketching activity and its representations [ 4 - 13 ]. The task of sketches generation
was also analyzed from the produced sketches as explicit representations of the
activity by studying essentially the criteria of creativity. Sketching activity refers to
the ! first tangibles and concrete tracks that are produced during the concept's
development, following a re fl exive and iterative approach which fl uctuates between
visualization and sketching. This process may be seen as a continuous re fl ective
conversation [ 14 ] between designer's thought and the intermediate representations
they produce and visualize. This process is a key step for the conceptualization by
answering to the functions of visualization and simulation by the externalization of
problem and solution-related information when developing new concepts [ 10 ].
On the other hand, the early activity situated before sketching remains less
explicit and so then less studied [ 15 - 22 ] . Indeed implicit activities provide less
tracks and their formalization call for speci ! c methods for the extraction of design
pro ! ciency. This is so still an emergent topic with few literature references, whereas
many references are available about sketching and detailed design. We did not
identify any models which offer a rigorous formalization of this phase except of
those cited in Eckert and Stacey [ 19 ] and Bouchard and Aoussat [ 3 , 5 ] . However,
the process according to which the designers integrate information in order to foster
mental images is crucial in order to better understand the design problem and to