Research on how designers work

How designers work. I haven’t looked at lots of dissertations, but this one is a beaut. It’s Henrik Gedenryd’s How designers work: Making sense of authentic cognitive activities. Here’s the abstract: In recent years, the growing scientific interest in design has led to great advances in our knowledge of authentic design processes. However,… [IDblog]

More from the abstract

At the same time, there is a growing movement of research on authentic cognitive activities, which has among other things documented the central roles of action and the physical environment in these activities, something that existing cognitive theories have overlooked and cannot properly account for. This creates an explanatory gap analogous to the one found in design.

This is definitely something for the short term reading list.