How designers talk: Constructing and analysing a design thinking data corpus

Peter Lloyd*, Almila Akdag Salah, Senthil Chandrasegaran

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A necessary condition of understanding how designers work is understanding how designers talk. In this paper we show how new methods of linguistic data analysis are beginning to reveal insights into the general nature of design conversations. For the first time we combine design activity data collected over 30 years by the Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS) ‘shared data’ series into a single corpus. We apply emerging techniques of analysis on this corpus and explore word forms, expressions, topics, and themes related to the particularities of how designers talk. We describe three such methods: generating category network maps using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) system; semantic grouping of words using word embeddings and examining the distribution of these groups across the datasets, and custom text generation using an AI-based language modeller. In applying these methods, we show that exploring design activity data at the corpus level can reveal more general patterns of design talk and raise key questions and hypotheses for further study. We see these methods as a first step in developing an understanding of how people not considered to be designers (e.g., scientists, business people, politicians) talk in ways that might be considered ‘designerly’.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication33rd International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM)
PublisherThe American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)978-0-7918-8542-0
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event33rd International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology, DTM 2021, Held as Part of the ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC-CIE 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 17 Aug 202119 Aug 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference
Volume6

Conference

Conference33rd International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology, DTM 2021, Held as Part of the ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC-CIE 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period17/08/2119/08/21

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