A Cognitive Approach to Architectural Style Several Characteristics of Design Thinking in Architecture

Designing is a complicated human behaviour and method, and is often treated as a mysterious “black box” operation in human mind. In the early period as for theory-studying of design thinking, the way of thinking that the researchers took were mostly descriptive discussions. Therefore, they lacked direct and empirical evidence although those studies provided significant exploration of design thinking (Wang, 1995). In recent years as for the study of cognitive science, they have tried to make design “glass box”. That is to try to make the thinking processes embedded in designers publicized. That is also to externalize the design procedure which provided the design studies another theoretical basis of more accurate and deeply researched procedure (Jones, 1992). Hence the studying of design thinking has become more important and the method of designing has also progressed a lot. For example, the classification of the nature of design problem such as ill-defined and well-defined (Newell, Shaw, and Simon, 1967), and different theoretical procedure modes for different disciplines, such as viewing architectural models as conjecture-analysis models and viewing engineering models as analysis-synthesis (Cross, 1991)