A NEW APPROACH FOR PROTOCOL ANALYSIS ON DESIGN ACTIVITIES USING AXIOMATIC THEORY OF DESIGN MODELING

• Published in: Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) 2011-08
• Main Authors: Yao, Shengji, Zeng, Yong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2371-5243; 2371-5243
• DOI: 10.24908/pceea.v0i0.3857

Although various design methodologies have been developed to help designers generate design concepts and design ideas, they must be applied by designers. Designers play an important and critical role in delivering a successful and innovative design. To understand how designers think in solving a problem during the design process will help us develop a new design methodology that can accommodate designer’s performance. This paper proposes a new protocol analysis approach to studying designer’s cognitive behaviour during the design process by using the axiomatic theory of design modeling. The conventional protocol analysis approach, which includes transcripts, segmentation, encoding and experiment results analysis, largely depends on the experience of the people who conduct the analysis. In this research, the concept of design state, derived from the axiomatic theory of design modeling, is used to guide the entire protocol analysis process. The consistency of analyzing subject’s protocol is checked by three operators. This paper reports our preliminary study of protocol analysis on design activities. In-depth report of this research will be given in our future work.