Transposing purposeful human action theory and task performance research into the design context

Purposeful human action theory and empirical task performance research inform our understanding of human action and how human action may be improved. The findings of these fields are often assumed to be generalizable across all areas of human activity. Several design theories, however, characterize design as a distinct regime of human action with ill-structured, wicked, and messy qualities. This perspective suggests that insights from other fields about purposeful action and task performance may not be applicable in design. This research addresses the gap between assumptions about human action uniformity across disciplines and design’s distinctive characteristics as an ill-structured domain. We proposed analogical reasoning as both an operational framework and an explanatory mechanism for transposing theories from well-structured contexts to design contexts. We demonstrated this approach with two investigations: Testing Kirsh and Maglio’s theory of epistemic and pragmatic actions in design contexts and exploring an approach to testing Bavelas’s empirical performance studies in design contexts. Our results showed that while some principles of purposeful human action theory and empirical task performance research remain relevant in design contexts, they could also require substantial adaptation. Without adaptation, the findings of both fields may be inapplicable or even misleading when applied to design. We hope this research contributes clarity to the development of design theory as well as to theory applications in design research, education, management, and practice.