Creative Cognition in Design

Guest lecture by Dr. Bo Christensen

How do designers design?

What strategies do designers use to reduce the inherent information uncertainty in creating novel and useful artifacts? What impact does the use of sketching and prototyping have on designers’ way of thinking? Is it really beneficial to performance to take a break from active problem solving (i.e., to ‘incubate’)? Do designers use analogies in their every day design – and if so, why?

These are all questions that Bo T. Christensen has looked into in his studies of designers and design cognition both in real-world design (using video and protocol analysis), and in the psychological laboratory.

Bo T. Christensen is a cognitive psychologist and recently defended his PhD in psychology from the University of Aarhus on the topic of Creative Cognition.