Research Areas

Design Cognition and Neurocognition
Design Cognition: protocol studies of designing; cognition of professionals versus students; studies of design education, role of drawings in designing
Design neurocognition: the behavior of the brain while designing; studies use fNIRS, EEG and fMRI
Physiological studies of designers: eye-tracking studies of designers designing , examining effect of task and visual representations.

Design Computing
Social behavior in design: founded on concepts from computational social science - situated cognition based agents to study interactions in individuals, teams and organizations using multi-agent systems
Situated design computing: computation founded on situated cognition concepts that allows the acquisition and re-use of experience
Computational models of creative design: affordance; analogy; emergence; situated agents, computational social science
Evolutionary systems in design: genetic engineering; style emergence, complex evolution
Ontologies: the development of the Function-Structure-Behaviour ontology and its application to designing, to designed objects and to designing processes (YouTube)
Visual representation and reasoning: emergence in design; shape representation; qualitative representations

Design Education
Cognitive and neurocognitive studies of design education: protocol studies using novel ontologically-based coding scheme that produces quantitative, commensurable results independent of domain, task and participant education and background; neurocognitive studies using fNIRS; projects including studying high school students, undergraduate students in multiple domains and professionals; projects include longitudinal and lateral studies.

Research Funding
Recent research funding for design cognition and neurocognition, design computing and design education research has come from NSF (CMMI, CNS, DRL, EEC, IIS and SBE programs), DARPA and NASA