Analysis of product designers' creative and cognitive processes. Recommendations for the development of EsQUIsE to support Product Design.

The goal of this work is to analyse the product designers’ main habits in creation and cognition, to study the sketches’ contributions to early stages of design processes (these sketches being one common feature in creation that designers have with architects) in order to evaluate if EsQUIsE could support product design. Several questions sequence this evaluation:

i) What are the main product designers’ work’s methods? What type of projects do they usually approach? What kind of issues, constraints do they have to confront?
ii) What are the cognitive processes involved during the design phases?
iii) When and how do sketches enter these processes? What are their effectiveness, their main contributions and on the opposite their main limitations?
iv) Assuming that sketches constitute for product designers an effective support for the early creative phases, what are their principal characteristics? What do they content? What are their predominant graphic codes in this particular domain?
v) What are the nowadays Computer-aided design tools’ appointed functions in product design? What are their advantages and drawbacks? How could they become better adapted to preliminary design phases?

These interrogations are considered thanks to the following work methodology:

• First an information collecting through a short state of art.

The following subjects are: projects and constraints analysis; technical background; summary of the principal creative and cognitive processes in design; study of sketches potentials; advantages and limitations of actual CAD tools and short listing of the main software used in product design.

• Then a straight contact with designers through interviews in order to collect their points of view on the previous subjects.

• Follow the appreciation of the previous theories and collected information thanks to the pragmatic character of two experiments.

These experiments bring new elements. They afford a better understanding of the general design theories, they confirm the sketches’ and 3D representations’ contributions to the design processes and furnish the first basis of graphic codes’ and sketches contents’ analysis.

• Finally, the observation of graphic designers during the modelling of a simple object permits the deeper analyse of the relationship the user maintains toward nowadays CAD tools.

A summary of the multiple aspects EsQUIsE should present to efficiently support the early conception phases in product design concludes this research.