Using linkography to understand the thinking differences of designers between engineering and art backgrounds in the early stages of the design process

Abstract

In China, industrial designers are usually educated with engineering background while product designers are educated with art background. Despite these educational differences, both of them are adept at tackling design-related issues. However, different educational backgrounds can affect the idea generation, especially in the early stages of the design progress. This study investigates the thinking processes of designers between engineering and art backgrounds in the early stages of the design process. Designers are encouraged to express ideas verbally or by sketching, and linkography was used to visually depict the designer’s thinking process. Subsequently, with the help of vertical transformation value and the chunk, the features in the thinking of the two types of designers are explored, including: 1) In most cases, the vertical transformation value of the product designer is higher than that of industrial designer, which indicates that product designer is better at the reflection in design. 2) The chunk patterns in the linkographs show that industrial designers prefer to decompose tasks into sub-tasks and solve them individually, while product design participants tend to solve problems as a whole from a global view. These findings can enlighten the future research directions for design education and design organizations in multidisciplinary backgrounds.

KEYWORDS:

• Design education
• design process
• design thinking
• linkography

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Graduate Education and Reform Project of China University of Mining and Technology under grant number 2023YJSJG015. We are grateful to their support.

Ethical approval

The protocol studies were conducted at China University of Mining and Technology, between 26th April 2022 and 4th July 2022.Since the experiment involved human subjects, the experiment was approved by the ethics committee of the university.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Graduate Education and Reform Project of China University of Mining and Technology under grant number [2023YJSJG015].