Designers' activities examined at three levels: organization, strategies and problem-solving processes

摘要

Through examples of data from three empirical design studies, the paper presents the type of analysis that cognitive psychology makes of the mental activities involved in design. These activities are analysed at three levels: the way in which designers organize their activity, the main strategies that they adopt, and the problem-solving processes that they use.Different types of design task are presented, i.e. functional-specification, software and composite-structure design tasks.The relevance of the results to artificial intelligence is discussed from an assistance viewpoint.