Analysing design behaviour: The design thinking research symposia series

The series of symposia on Design Thinking Research (DTRS) was begun in 1991 with seven symposia and workshops held to date. The series has produced a substantial set of publications in books and journals, with significant research results, and has helped foster an international community of scholars and researchers focused on design cognition. One particular innovation of the series is the use of common data. The second and seventh workshops collected data on design process and distributed these to a large number of research groups for analysis. In the paper we describe how this was done in detail, and argue that as a method ‘common data analysis’ applies particularly well to design research