This thesis describes research carried to investigate the evidence of design heuristics andtheir role in the design ideation process. Design heuristics are guidelines that help thedesigner to consider areas of possible designs that may not otherwise come to mindduring the idea generation stage. The research is cross-disciplinary bringing findings,methods, and perspectives from cognitive psychology to product design domain. Theexploratory research work undertaken has produced a list of design heuristics that arecommonly used by designers in generating diverse concepts, inspiring design ideas thatin turn affect the design outputs produced through the creative design process.By combining content analysis of real-world examples of expert designs andinvestigation of expert and novice designers’ decision processes through case studiesusing designers’ sketching processes, a set of design heuristics was constructed as an aidfor designers. A short list of heuristics was selected and validated through experimentalstudies with novices. It was shown that designers employed cognitive heuristics in orderto enhance the variety, quality, and creativity of potential designs they generate duringthe ideation stage. Specific design heuristics helped the designer to explore the problemspace of potential designs, leading to the generation of creative solutions. Theeffectiveness of instruction on design heuristics in solving design problems was alsoshown since, even for novice designers, a few minutes of text and illustration onheuristics led to designs reliably judged as more creative and diverse. The evidencesuggested that research on design heuristics used in design problem solving cancontribute to our understanding of cognitive processes in design and the assessment ofdesign ability, help identify more effective instructional and computational tools tosupport designers at any level of expertise, and improve pedagogical approaches toteaching design.
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