Reducing Information To Stimulate Design Imagination

This paper describes an experiment that is part of a larger research project that compares the visual reasoning between groups of designers and non-designers. In particular, this experiment focuses on how designers’ processes of reasoning is characterized when they are given different levels of reduced information of an object in comparison to a group of non-designers. The experiment used deconstructed and scaled-down components of Gerrit Riedveld’s iconic Red and Blue Chair (1918). Three groups were given 3 different levels of information - group 1 were given components painted the same color as the original chair, group 2 were given components painted in a single (white) color, and group 3 were given unpainted (natural) components. The results suggest that the 3 levels of reduced information impacted on the designers’ reasoning processes and there were clear differences in the visual reasoning processes between design and non-design participants.