Kansei Information Processes in Early Design: Design Cognition and Computation - Emotional Engineering - page 55

stimulate new directions in the generation of solutions. Both the inspirational
process and the information seeking process involved before concepts generation
are essential for problem interpretation and solving.
The overall information process is a dynamic process including both an inspi-
rational process which is not always conscious, and the information seeking pro-
cess carried out when solving a design problem. The inspirational process involves
sources of inspiration encompassing precedents and other sources from sectors of
analogy (nature, industrial sectors, arts). Designers use intensively some references
from these sources of inspiration which are mainly visual, but also possibly sound
or scents. These sources play an important role in order to de ! ne new contexts for
new designs to communicate inside of the design team and to inform new design
solutions and open the scope of possibilities [ 19 ]. They stimulate cognitive oper-
ations such as association and analogical reasoning and lead to the emergence of
new ideas and concepts. The information seeking process, namely the exploration
process [ 23 ] is involved in order to solve a speci ! c problem. It enables to gather the
information that is needed in order to understand the design problem [ 24 , 25 ], and
discover useful ways of solutions [ 26 , 27 ] . We discovered in previous studies the
weight of analogies in kansei information. Analogies are a great support for
divergent thinking. It is recognized as one of the most powerful process in creative
reasoning.
2.2 Information Process in Design
Design information is conveyed through various media such as conversations, text,
images, sketches, and models. It can be stored in physical or digital spaces. Even if
all the senses come into play in the perceptive, affective, and cognitive processing
of information, a most important place is still often given to the visual sense. This
visual information refers to various angles which can be functional, structural,
affective, aesthetic, or others. The sectors of in fl uence play a major role in the
creative process where designers will reuse some features from the sectors of
in fl uence and transfer them into the reference sector. This will bring a creative
distance which is necessary to provide original design solutions [ 2 ] . Oppositely, the
more these references will be close of the reference sector, the more the implica-
tions will be functional or structural [ 28 ] . The research on modeling the cognitive
activities of the designers in this phase is of growing interest in the ! field of design
science, and also in other area such as arti ! cial intelligence and psychology. If
sketching activity has been well studied and is still of interest for research, implicit
categorization processes which intervene at the same time are more dif ! cult to grasp
and were not so studied and formalized so far. Some studies were already led on
this topic in the ! fields of architecture [ 17 ] and of kansei-based image retrieval [ 29 ] .
The dif ! culty comes from the subjectivity inherent to the cognitive operations
engaged, and from the multidimensional design [ 29 ] and holistic character of the
visual information used and produced in design projects. Some formalizations were