Fundamental questions:

What are designers doing, thinking, and feeling when they do design?

How can we improve their performance?

Early mistakes (1984 - 1990):

Premature focus on computational tools instead of communication tools.

Exclusive focus on the individual instead of the individual and the team.

Failure to investigate differences between analysis thinking and synthesis thinking.

Current areas of research:

Design documentation and information reuse:

- Electronic notebooks

Social and cognitive aspects of design:

- Information handling behavior
- Question asking
- Individual differences
- Team diversity and composition
- Motivation and attention

Design communication:

- Sketching
- Gesturing
- Hardware manipulation

Distributed team design:

- Physical and virtual spaces

Cross disciplinary and cross functional design

- Mechatronics
- Biodesign

Design education

- Design thinking: synthesis and analysis
- Coaching

Management of design teams

- Innovation management
- Computational simulation

Research threads:

Focus on early stage conceptual design.

Focus on teams.

Focus on realistic situations.

Development of tools and methods to improve the process.