Design activities and cognitive processes of visual communication designers - Through verbal and visual protocol analyses of the thinking processes -

Abstract

Researches on design activity and cognitive process of different design disciplines have been explored on the foundation of design thinking theories through various research methods. This paper calls to the attention of visual communication designers' thinking processes with research goals of proposing a research method for the analysis of visual communication designer’s thinking process and conducting experiments on visual communication designers to analyze design activities and cognitive processes from problem structuring phase to detailing phase. After a comprehensive review on research methods for the analysis of design thinking process, experiment appropriate for examining design activities and cognitive processes of visual communication designers is designed. Two visual communication designers participated in the experiment and the verbal and visual data collected are analyzed through two separate coding schemes. Results from the experiments indicate that visual communication designers perform various activity modes such as thinking, examining, writing, sketching, and working with computer throughout the process of designing. They structure ill-defined design problem by multi-modal activities of thinking and examining and generate either a design concept or a visual concept by writing and sketching. They refine visual design by working with computer. The simultaneity and the modal shifts of the activities have shown to make novel design decisions. Visual communication designers diverge their thoughts during problem structuring phase to preliminary design and again, during design refinement to detailing for visual exploration . Convergence of visual concept is done rapidly after examining their writings. Convergence of visual execution is done by the designer’s level of satisficing design work through computer iterations.