'applications for Experminting' or 'reasoning Agents' as Design Decision Support Tools

In this paper, we analyze the usage and impact of information technology in the early design phases of the architectural design process. Typical topics of concern in these phases are idea generation, theory formation, hypothetical reasoning, analogical reasoning, and so forth. Although these phases of the design process have been studied before, not many facts are really known about them, nor about the impact of information technology on these phases. We therefore started an investigation of existing theories of the reasoning and decision-making processes of designers, and creative practitioners in general. This research makes diverse links with various theories in philosophy, in particular to theories that resulted from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce on the process of (scientific) inquiry (Peirce, 1958). These theories suggest that the human mind continuously cycles through three reasoning modes: abductive, deductive and inductive reasoning. The abductive reasoning mode is hereby considered as the one that produces ideas and enables interpretation; the deductive reasoning mode enables making predictions based on these interpretations; the inductive reasoning mode enables learning from experiments by refutation or confirmation. As such, we consider this interpretation of Peirce’s theory a good explanatory framework for the topics of concern in the early design process. In Pauwels et al. (2012), two main approaches were distinguished towards information system support in the early design phase: (1) applications for experimenting or making design tryouts, and (2) applications as autonomous reasoning agents. This short paper briefly outlines the feasibility of applying both approaches.