Distributed thinking across mind and media: creative design in traditional tools and generative design

Creative design is a central driver for innovation success, as design decisions fundamentally shape downstream performance and cost of products. Visual thinking, the iterative reasoning across internal and external visual representations, is the engine for creative design across engineering, architecture, and art. This highlights the distributed nature of visual thinking across mind and media. Internal resources such as visual working memory and domain knowledge coordinate with external media to support design representation, re-interpretation, and transformation. Meanwhile, the designer’s toolkit is expanding rapidly from traditional media such as sketching and CAD modeling to AI-augmented design tools like generative design. These technological advances can profoundly alter the distributed visual thinking system and thus creative outcomes. However, empirical research in design cognition remains fragmented in its examination of traditional tools and is only beginning to address emerging technologies. Theoretical accounts, though, acknowledge the interplay between internal cognition and external design media. However, these accounts have yet to systematically integrate this interplay within a distributed cognition framework grounded in cognitive science. At this technological and theoretical intersection, this dissertation develops and empirically tests a distributed visual thinking framework. The framework explains how visual thinking paths emerge from the interplay of mind and media. Crucially, perceptual processing is conceptualized as a central interface that underpins this interplay by linking the mind and media. Through this interface, external representations providing perceptual support interact with internal resources to form and transform internal representations. This distributed perspective provides not only crucial conceptual insights into visual thinking in design but also valuable practical guidance for designers, design tool developers, and design educators alike. Three studies examine distributed visual thinking across different configurations of this perceptual interface. The first study investigates the system distributed across the designer and externalized design representations, the classical form of perceptual support. Using a meta-analytic approach, it synthesizes fragmented empirical findings to clarify how external representations interact with internal design knowledge to shape visual thinking paths and creative outcomes. The results provide the first meta-analytical support for a distributed account by showing that external perceptual support facilitates visual thinking through offloading and, in interaction with internal knowledge, through re-interpretation. Moreover, a defining property of perceptual support, representational ambiguity, critically shapes thinking paths, promoting wide exploration (fluency, variety, and potentially novelty) while constraining deep refinement (elaboration and aesthetics). With the increasing integration of generative design into practice, its capability to produce vast design spaces introduces a qualitatively different distributed configuration. The second study therefore examines the system formed by the designer and a generative design space. Through a controlled experiment, it investigates how the perceptual structure of grouping within generative outputs influences convergent thinking and design fixation during design search. The findings show that perceptual grouping moderately mitigates fixation on familiar designs. Moreover, grouping fosters variety-over-quantity search in conjunction with high design knowledge, but quantity-over-variety search in the presence of low design knowledge. To uncover the cognitive mechanism underlying these contrasting search paths, the third study investigates how perceptual grouping in a complex generative design space affects internal visual working memory. Using an experimental change-detection paradigm, the results show that perceptual grouping enhances internal capacity and supports more structured, hierarchical internal representations. Together, the second and third studies reinforce the distributed account. They demonstrate that external media impact both the capacity for and structure of internal representations, while domain knowledge shapes how these internal representations are deployed in design search. Therefore, this dissertation fundamentally reconceptualizes design cognition from a predominantly internal perspective to a distributed system perspective, thereby opening new research directions. It integrates perceptual support, perception, visual working memory, and domain knowledge into a unified framework that explains how distinct visual thinking paths and creative trade-offs emerge. Practically, the findings provide actionable guidance for designers to align their selection of design media with creative goals. They also guide design tool developers in configuring perceptual support in traditional and AI-augmented tools to enhance creativity. Furthermore, they support design educators in cultivating novices’ creative visual thinking across media. Beyond design, these insights extend to creative human-technology interaction across vast visual domains.

Author dc:creator

• Zhu, Binfang

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Salomo, Søren

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-26272

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:depositonce.tu-berlin.de:11303/27436