Kansei Information Processes in Early Design: Design Cognition and Computation - Emotional Engineering - page 61

Table 1 according to the three levels, high, middle, down, and the 10 categories
[semantic descriptors (Hs), values (Hv), analogies (Ha), style (Hy), sector names
(Ms), context (Mc), function (Mf), color (Lc), shape (Lf), and texture (Lt)].
4.2 Design Experiment Objectives
The aim of our protocol study was to determine the kind of information the
designers use and how it is transformed or categorized during early sketching.
Expected results are kansei information processing operations and determining how
this design information is transformed or categorized during early sketching.
4.3 Methods
For understanding design-related kansei information, most of the methods are based
on the explicit representations used or produced by designers. These methods show
certain limitations insofar as many of the cognitive activities of designers during the
early stages of design are implicit. Some approaches are provided by methods
drawn from ethnography, or by the think-aloud technique, concurrent and retro-
spective [ 20 ] . In this experiment, we used an activity-based approach, which is a
combination of these methods. Indeed, concurrent protocols are considered better
suited to our study in that we focus on design information and analogical reasoning.
Semi-directive interviews were also conducted at the end of the experiment to
compensate for the limits of the concurrent methodology. As participants, two
third-year undergraduate design students and six expert product designers were
recruited (one female and seven males). The six expert designers had a mean of
9 years of experience. If one designer who had worked in product design for
28 years is excluded, the mean number of years of professional experience
decreases to 5.2 years. The experiment was conducted at the design agencies of the
participants to collect data in their natural working environments. We used two
video cameras and one voice recorder to collect verbalizations. One video camera
captured the movements of the hands of each designer and recorded close-ups of the
sketches, and the second recorded the entire body of the designer.
The protocol involved three phases: (1) Warm-up phase, in which we explained
the procedure of the experiment and participants became accustomed to the practice
of concurrent verbalization (15 min). (2) Concurrent verbalization, in which par-
ticipants were asked to work on the design brief: Designing a Nike vacuum cleaner.
During this phase, they started to generate early sketches using traditional tools and
simultaneously verbalized their thoughts (60 min). (3) Semi-directive interview
about the mental images, semantic descriptors, and forms generated as well as about
the relationships among those three types of data (15 min).