Capturing mental models: An analysis of designers actions, ideas, and intentions

What do designers actually do while they are designing? How about their ideas and intentions toward a specific design activity? These issues are still urgently in need of resolution since designers play such a crucial role in the design process. However, existing research primarily concentrates on the explicit knowledge representation of designers' activities, but ignores tacit information that is underlying the motivation behind those activities. Fortunately, as a psychology-based inner cognitive representation of external reality, mental models take us a glimpse into explaining and driving designer activities. Based on the above, this paper proposed a novel framework with Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Word2Vec integrated harmoniously to capture the designer' activities. Additionally, both the know-how and know-why knowledge were represented by eliciting knowledge structure and belief structure of mental models respectively. Based on the distribution values of these two structures, the using opportunities of designer’s ideas are further explored to reveal their potential for being adopted, improved, explored, or discarded during the design process. Then the detailed design process is characterized by mental models to express the designers actions, ideas, and intentions for the artifact that they are designing. Finally, the experimental results performed a practical design case demonstrating that our proposed framework is applicable and helpful for designing.