Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper seeks to understand designers' abstraction in ill- structured problem-solving. We utilize a protocol study with expert designers to empirically analyze the abstraction process in the latent need problem setting. A logic-based abstraction schema is found to model the process the designers employed. The study reveals how designers utilize this schema, detailing, developing, and evaluating solutions for ill-structured problems. It highlights the recursive nature of abstraction and raises questions about the termination of the process in ill- structured domains. We conclude by proposing a computational model to further evaluate abstraction in complex problem-solving scenarios.