Dear Mattias and Lars,
The significance of neuroscience to design research was already well established in the 1980s (e.g. Bastick, T.(1982) Intuition: How we Think and Act, Wiley). It emerged more strongly in the 1990s, and since then the literatures of neuroscience in design research have expanded exponentially.
But only in some design research fields...
There are now substantial design research literatures on neuroscience in the design fields of Advertising, Marketing, Instructional Design and many Engineering design fields.
But, as you say, hardly at all in classic Art and Design fields.
Much of the practical benefit of neuroscience to date has been in contributing to the conceptual mid-ground of understanding behaviours, motivations, choices, cognitive processes and biases and other relatively tacit activities of designers and users. In a sense, neuroscience has offered a significant refinement of the rather coarser inputs to design research that were previously drawn from classical Psychology and Philosophy. These benefits have applied most obviously and easily to all those design research fields in which Psychology and Philosophy have previously contributed strongly
The relative absence of neuroscience in the literatures of design research in Art and Design fields says more, I suggest, about the cultures of Art and Design fields, a focus on Art traditions of thinking, and a lack of depth in science and maths, rather than the ease or difficulty of including findings from neuroscience.
If this is so, then one might soon expect to see new Art and Design disciplines emerging grounded in neuroscience and similar scientific advances, and very different from, and separate to, traditional Art and Design fields.
Best wishes,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love
MICA, PMACM, MAISA, FDRS, AMIMechE
Director
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
[log in to unmask]
www.designoutcrime.org
+61 (0)4 3497 5848
==
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mattias Arvola
Sent: Saturday, 10 February 2018 5:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The concept of concept?
Lars,
You shouldn't be surprised there is little neuroscience in design research. Even studying basic concept formation using neuroscience is a difficult task. Neuroscience allows you to look at things at a neural level, you have quite a few of abstraction levels up to the macro-level of cognition (motives, activities, reason, consciousness, and socially, culturally, and physically situated cognition). The ecological validity of making generalizations between abstraction levels can be questioned. We don't even know how to explain the correlates of the experienced phenomenon and brain activation, which is a cornerstone of cognitive neuroscience. So we should be careful with bold statements between the levels of abstraction. But I know many reductionist cognitive neuroscientists disagree with me.
There are however mechanisms at the neural level that can be interesting to study in design research, but they will be confined to quite an unnatural lab and experiment situation, and ecological validity will therefore also be questionable in this kind of research. I'm although sure that neuroscientific studies in design will provide valuable insights in the coming years.
John Gero mentioned that they had started to run some experiments using ERP. And I think that Maarit Mäkelä and Camilla Groth at Aalto are working in this direction too. I'm sure that there is more research currently underway.
Best regards
Mattias Arvola, Ph.D., Docent
Associate Professor of Cognitive Science Director of the Cognitive Science Bachelor’s Programme Department of Computer and Information Science Linköping University Phone +46 13 28 57 03
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