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Involvement of right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in ill-structured design cognition: An fMRI study

The paper reports results from a study, which was funded by the AHRC/EPSRC Embracing Complexity in Design II project (ECiD II), under the Designing for the 21st Century initiative. The study was a continuation of the collaboration with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in UCL that started with the first study of design using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The paper is part of a research program that aims to identify the cognitive structures that are involved in design thinking and the conditions that make people capable to address design tasks. The paper used a new method (Psycho-Physiological Interactions analysis) to study the functional connectivity between brain areas during ill-structured design tasks. This was a new method at the time of publication that allowed asking questions about the interaction between brain regions and their functional dependency. The results show that ill-structured design tasks and well-structured tasks differ not only in overall levels of brain activity but also in patterns of functional interactions between brain regions. The paper makes a contribution to the field of design cognition by showing that there is a distinctive pattern of how brain areas interact during ill-structured design in comparison to well-structured tasks. It thus provides insights into how the design process unfolds in the brain and the mechanisms that support it. This informs the development of cognitive and computational models of design thinking and more generally the understanding of design as a distinct category of thinking across different domains. Additionally, it provides evidence about the role of visual imagery and self-reflection that can inform the development of design teaching. The author was invited to present this work at the conference ‘Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age’ in Delft and contributed a chapter in the edited volume resulting from the conference, published by Springer.