Design has shifted from product manufacturing to tackling systems’ complexities in social innovation, focusing on participatory and human-centered design. Despite tools developed to enhance participation, differing perspectives complicate co-creation, necessitating better ways for interdependent thinking and communication. Designers must be embedded within the same social and cultural contexts as others, engaging in long-term participation. Establishing a design context that transcends temporary action but with a joint vision and tasks achievement is crucial. This study identifies varying levels of designers’ involvement and the differences of design context construction. Three modes are illustrated: (1) patching-based, (2) intertwining-based, and (3) expanding-based design context construction. This study advances design theory, encouraging designers to engage in multi-level collaboration.

Design occurs in complex socio-technical contexts with conflicting stakeholder goals, requirements and other constraints. These limit solution options and create trade-offs where improvements relative to one goal come at the expense of performance on another. Little is known about how the design context influences trade-offs, or how designers interact with context to manage trade-offs. This article reports on an exploratory qualitative interview study investigating design trade-offs in relation to their socio-technical context. We identified nine themes reflecting engineering designers’ perceptions of the influence of the design context on their ability to resolve trade-offs. Findings suggest that the design context is both a source of trade-offs, and of knowledge and information that helps designers clarify ambiguous requirements to navigate and resolve trade-offs. The results provide insight into how designers interact with the design context to learn about the structure of their design problems and the degrees of freedom available to resolve trade-offs. The findings also contribute to understanding the effects of path dependencies in trade-off situations, and how the sequential distribution of design decisions over time constrains trade-off resolution. We discuss some of the goals and challenges of conducting rigorous qualitative research in design and identify potential directions for further research.

Style is an ordering principle by which to structure artifacts in a design domain. The application of a visual order entails some explicit grouping property that is both cognitively plausible and contextually dependent. Central to cognitive–contextual notions are the type of representation used in analysis and the flexibility to allow semantic interpretation. We present a model of visual style based on the concept of similarity as a qualitative context-dependent categorization. The two core components of the model are semantic feature extraction and self-organizing maps (SOMs). The model proposes a method of categorizing two-dimensional unannotated design diagrams using both low-level geometric and high-level semantic features that are automatically derived from the pictorial content of the design. The operation of the initial model, called Q-SOM, is then extended to include relevance feedback (Q-SOM:RF). The extended model can be seen as a series of sequential processing stages, in which qualitative encoding and feature extraction are followed by iterative recategorization. Categorization is achieved using an unsupervised SOM, and contextual dependencies are integrated via cluster relevance determined by the observer's feedback. The following stages are presented: initial per feature detection and extraction, selection of feature sets corresponding to different spatial ontologies, unsupervised categorization of design diagrams based on appropriate feature subsets, and integration of design context via relevance feedback. From our experiments we compare different outcomes from consecutive stages of the model. The results show that the model provides a cognitively plausible and context-dependent method for characterizing visual style in design.