A study on designer's mental process of information categorization in the early stages of design

This research explores how designers mentally categorize design information during early sketching in the early stages of design. With the purpose of identifying various types of mental information and related cognitive operations, the empirical study has been conducted with 8 experienced product designers through the concurrent verbalization. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the results is also presented. The concrete examples about mental information are defined in terms of 3 levels (high, middle, low) and 10 categories (semantic words(Hs), values(Hv), analogy(Ha), style(Hy), sector name(Ms), context(Mc), function(Mf), colour(Lc), form(Lf) and texture(Lt)). Finally the results showed that there are also three cognitive operations between working memory and long term memory: memory retrieval, association and transformation in order to generate early sketches.