A laboratory study of design students

  Write a summary that includes the main points and make it super simple and understandable. Also, write a reflection. the word count is in the guidelines. please write summary above the summary and reflection above the summary for me to know the difference Some years ago I was interested in the general question of cogni-tive style in the design process and how it was acquired. As first a student of architecture and then a student of psychology I began to feel that my fellow students shared some common ways of thinking but that the architects seemed to think in distinctly dif-ferent ways to the psychologists. Two very specific questions then developed out of this general interest. Were these differences real or not and, if real, did they reflect the different nature of people. HOW DESIGNERS THINK who became architects as opposed to psychologists or did they reflect the different nature of their jobs? A series of experimental situations was therefore devised in which the subjects would solve design-likeproblems under laboratory con-ditions with no other distractions (Lawson 1972). It was, of course, vital that no specialist technical knowledge was necessary to solve the problems to avoid giving any advantage to the architect subjects over the others. In one experiment the subjects had to complete a design using a number of modular coloured wooden blocks. They were given more blocks than they actually needed, and the design problem required a single storey arrangement of three modular bays by four bays. The vertical faces of the blocks were coloured red and blue and, on each occasion the subject was required to make the perimeter wall of the final arrangement either as red or as blue as possible (Fig. 3.5). The task was made more complex by the introduction of some `hidden' rules governing allowed relationships between some of the blocks. This meant that some combinations of blocks would be allowed whilst others would not. These rules were changed for each problem, and the subjects knew that some rules were in oper-ation but were not told what they were. Thus this abstract problem is in reality a very simplified design situation where a physical three-dimensional solution has to achieve certain stated perform-ance objectives while obeying a relational structure which is not entirely explicit at the outset. In order not to intimidate the subjects, they were left alone to solve the problems with a computer setting each problem and Figure 3.5 A laboratory experiment to investigate the design proce: