Kansei Information Processes in Early Design: Design Cognition and Computation - Emotional Engineering - page 56

proposed in the framework of the development of information systems dedicated to
the designers for supporting design activity. These information systems are
sometimes accompanied with an annotation system, and more rarely with a search
engine. These tools return relevant information to the designers for their activity,
especially for the inspirational or information search tasks, by providing them a big
quantity of data. These systems are yet insuf ! ciently adapted to designers' needs
and natural activity. This is due to a lack of understanding and formalization of the
cognitive activity in those phases. In particular, designers' skills mainly lie in
applying expert rules. These rules rely on a particular ability enabling them to link
high-level information (semantic descriptors) with low-level information (colors,
textures, forms). First attempts were achieved in order to propose information
systems which would be able to take into account these dimensions [ 30 ].
2.3 Sectors of In fl uence in Design
A main information source in the information phase of the design process is coming
from the sectors of in fl uence used by the designers during divergent thinking. The
identi ! cation of information as pertaining to speci ! c semantic sectors is an
important means of achieving analogical references for designers. Studies by
Bouchard and Aoussat [ 3 , 5 ] , investigating the information sources of car designers,
have enabled to make explicit the designers' sectors of in fl uence in car design.
These studies also con ! rmed that these sectors are long-term indicators. In the
context of design activity, sectors of in fl uence correspond to discrete semantic
domains that bear analogical reference to the target domain (e.g., arts, nature,
industrial design, transportation, furniture design). Designers are able to select
relevant information, considering also different levels of information abstraction:
high/middle (e.g., semantic adjectives, consumer values) or low-level information
(e.g., shape, color, or texture), and in doing so bring analogical references to the
target domain. In this regard, sectors of in fl uence play a major role in ! filtering the
information that is useful for the designers. A deconstruction of this process,
comprising three steps is provided in Fig. 1 . Starting from the reference sector, the
designer will investigate and explore analogies in other sectors that are more or less
semantically proximate. Having identi ! ed inspirational materials that can be
extracted, the designer proceeds to the analogical sector and then transfers the
solution back to the reference sector. This is also the basic concept model of
creativity. With this example, we can mainly see the similarity of shape features
used between a snake in the analogical sector and the front side of a car in the
reference sector, which is car design. This provides an aggressive expression to the
vehicle, which is satisfying for a sporty vehicle.