This work-in-progress research presents a novel approach to assessing tutor-student interactions in design studio critiques, thereby advancing studio assessment methodologies. Following constructivist theories, students learn by practicing professional design behaviors. They introduce new concepts and progress according to the tutor's feedback and demonstration. Despite their principal role, critique interactions are often tutor-centric and ambiguous, resulting in negative sentiments that may hinder participation. Current methods measure solely learners' performance of design practices while neglecting the cognitive actions involved, such as the learner's sentiment. This gap limits assessing the effectiveness of the interaction. In this study, we measure the effect of sentiment on introducing new design concepts, identified as first occurrences (FOs). We demonstrate the approach in two natural case studies comprising six critiques of three CS students and three Architecture students. NLP algorithms are developed to quantify the distribution of FOs generated by students and tutors within positive and negative sentiment environments. Changes in the sentiment throughout critiques measure the temporal role of sentiment in generating FOs. Observations exhibit differences in sentiment between CS and Architecture students. In both courses, more learner-centric FOs occurred in a positive sentiment environment. Using explicit assessment methods opens new possibilities for establishing real-time feedback systems, leading studio-based education to its next step in reshaping constructivist pedagogy.

This paper presents the initial findings of a design cognition study involving two groups of high school juniors: those who have taken pre-engineering courses and those who have not. Equal numbers of dyad teams from both groups engaged in design-only sessions in which they generated solutions in response to the same design challenge. The design sessions were video and audio recorded. The recordings were transcribed and then segmented and coded using the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) ontologically-based design issues and design processes coding scheme. The students' design cognition was measured from the distributions of the design issues and design processes. Both the design issues and design processes were compared between the two high school student groups. Additionally, the results of the analyses were compared to baseline undergraduate engineering students. The results of this study did not reveal significant differences in either design issues or processes between the two high school student groups. However, when compared with the baseline undergraduate engineering students, there were significant differences between these groups with respect both to issues and processes and to the cognitive effort in their problem/solutions spaces.

This paper reports the progress of a three-year longitudinal study on the impact of design education on students' design thinking and practice. Students from two curricula at a large research-intensive state university are being studied. The control group is a major focused on engineering mechanics, which has little formal design education prior to the capstone experience. The experimental group is a mechanical engineering major that uses design as a context for its curriculum. A task-independent protocol analysis method grounded in the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) design ontology is utilized to provide a common basis for comparing students across projects and years. This paper presents results of two years of the study, which included students at the beginning and the end of their sophomore year, and at the end of their junior year. The results of analyzing and comparing the percent occurrences of design issues and problem-solution index from the protocol analysis of both cohorts are presented. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how students' design cognition is affected by a design course.

This paper describes some acts of psychological creativity as phenomena arising from changes to a situation, brought about through interpretation. It presents a way of representing a situation as a schema of concepts made up from perceptual dimensions. It shows the utility of concepts as being changed by the situation within which they are used. An example of this is described, in which the information within a concept is unchanged yet its use becomes different through salience weighting. A computational implemented example is presented as a generate-and-interpret model that produces country growth indicators and then interprets them and repeats this process. The situation, and the space of possible designs, is changed through the act of interpretation. It is suggested that interpretation can be a driver for changing situations -- something that looks like P-creativity to an outside observer.

This paper presents the results of design cognition studies of two groups of students: high school juniors and seniors who have taken pre-engineering courses and sophomore university students in a mechanical engineering department. Both groups carried out design sessions designing for the same design challenge. Data were collected using the protocol analysis technique through video and audio recordings of design sessions. The students' design cognition was measured by segmenting and coding the transcribed videos using the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) ontologically-based design issues and design processes coding scheme that provides a uniform basis for analyzing design protocols. Differences in design cognition were found and tentative explanations provided to account for them.

This paper presents first year results of a longitudinal study of how engineering students develop design competencies over time, and how these competencies are affected by design education. Using a task-independent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology, the authors are able to evaluate students' cognitive processes as they work in pairs to respond to a design scenario. In this paper, the authors analyze data from experiments that occurred before and after the participants completed a sophomore-level design course. The percent occurrences of design issues and syntactic design processes from the first and second halves of each of the two experimental design sessions are analyzed and compared in order to identify differences in students' design behaviors. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how sophomore students' design ability is affected by a design course.

This paper presents a novel computational approach to the study of creativity. In particular, it discusses a modeling framework that addresses the worth of ideas ascribed by agents embedded in a social world. The triple objective of this system is to improve our understanding of how ideas may emerge from a few individuals, how social interaction may result in the ascription of value to new ideas, and how culture may evolve through time, transforming or replacing dominant or consensual ideas. The proposed system encompasses commonalities in existing theories of creativity, and suggests future theoretical directions that can be explored via simulation.

Abstract Architectural plans are design diagrams that describe building layout where space is planned according to design requirements. Style in architecture is generally characterized as common features appearing in a particular class of building design. This research seeks to address how to recognize architectural design style from a 2D plan diagram. We explore this question in a computational encoder‐analyzer (E‐A) model for 2D plans, where a characterization of 2D style is based on qualitative spatial representation and information theoretic measures. In a preliminary study of a prominent architect's plans, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We conclude by discussing practical applications of automated plan recognition and classification in design support tools.

This paper presents computational models of creative designing. It commences with describing notions of creative designing within individuals, groups and then societies. In doing so it moves from absolute to situated cognition approaches. The paper then describes various computational approaches that simulate individual create designing processes with exemplars. It then moves on to describe situated cognition as the basis for group creative designing, which is described through a multi-agent example. Finally, the notion of creativity as a social behaviour is explored through simulations.

In this paper, we describe a novel approach to developing computational models of creativity that supports the multiple approaches to the study of artificial creative systems. The artificial creativity approach to the development of computational models of creative systems is described with reference to Csikszentmihalyi's systems view of creativity. Some interesting results from studies using an early implementation of an artificially creative system, The Digital Clockwork Muse, are presented. The different studies show how the artificial creativity approach supports the study of creativity from a variety of standpoints that mirror the disciplines that study human creativity. The use of artificial creativity allows these different studies to be conveniently conducted on the same computational model and integrated in to a more complete picture of the creative process.

We present an extension to the standard genetic algorithm (GA), which is based on concepts of genetic engineering. The motivation is to discover useful and harmful genetic materials and then execute an evolutionary process in such a way that the population becomes increasingly composed of useful genetic material and increasingly free of the harmful genetic material. Compared to the standard GA, it provides some computational advantages as well as a tool for automatic generation of hierarchical genetic representations specifically tailored to suit certain classes of problems.

Genetic algorithms and genetic programming have found considerable application in design. This paper presents some extensions to these approaches drawn from analogies with the more recently developed areas of genetic engineering and developmental biology. The article describes some approaches to the use in design of genetic engineering with genetic algorithms and the introduction of processes derived from analogies with developmental biology.