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CORRELATING DESIGN PERFORMANCE TO EEG ACTIVATION: EARLY EVIDENCE FROM EXPERIMENTAL DATA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2021

Shumin Li ,
Niccolò Becattini  and
Gaetano Cascini
Shumin Li*
Affiliation:
Politecnico di Milano
Niccolò Becattini
Affiliation:
Politecnico di Milano
Gaetano Cascini
Affiliation:
Politecnico di Milano
*
Li, Shumin, Politecnico di Milano, Mechanical Engineering, Italy, [email protected]

Abstract

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This paper presents an EEG (Electroencephalography) study that explores correlations between the neurophysiological activations, the nature of the design task and its outputs. We propose an experimental protocol that covers several design-related tasks: including fundamental activities (e.g. idea generation and problem-solving) as well as more comprehensive task requiring the complex higher-level reasoning of designing. We clustered the collected data according to the characteristics of the design outcome and measured EEG alpha band activation during elementary and higher-level design task, whereas just the former yielded statistically significant different behaviour in the left frontal and occipital area. We also found a significant correlation between the ratings for elementary sketching task outcomes and EEG activation at the higher-level design task. These results suggested that EEG activation enables distinguishing groups according to their performance only for elementary tasks. However, this also suggests a potential application of EEG data on the elementary tasks to distinguish the designers' brain response during higher-level of design task.

Keywords

ElectroencephalographyNeurocognitionHuman behaviour in designCreativityDesign cognition
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 1: ICED21 , August 2021 , pp. 771 - 780
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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