The cognitive basis of emergence: implications for design support

Emergent shapes play a significant role in the creative design process. Designers frequently visualize emergent shapes and structure their understanding of the design and their reasoning about it in terms of emergent entities and relations. In design research, effort has concentrated on developing computational models capable of representing emergent shapes. Much less attention has been paid to the cognitive processes that give rise to emergence. In cognitive science, however, emergence has been the subject of empirical study. It is suggested that both the study of perception and that of mental imagery can contribute to understanding the cognitive psychological basis of emergence and the nature of emergent shapes that arise. Relevant cognitive science research findings are reviewed in this paper. Based on these findings two main classes of emergence processes are developed. Their implications for the development of user-interactive computational models of emergent shapes are then discussed.