Published papers

Physical skills and language skills are both fundamental intelligent abilities of human being. In this paper, we focus our attention to such sophisticated physical skills as playing sports and playing instruments and introduce research activities aiming at elucidating and verbalizing them. This research area has been launched recently. We introduce approaches from physical modeling, measurements and data analysis, cognitive science and human interface. We also discuss such issues as skill acquisition and its support systems. Furthermore, we consider a fundamental issue of individual differences occurring in every application of skill elucidation. Finally we introduce several attempts of skill elucidation in the fields of dancing, manufacturing, playing string instruments, sports science and medical care.

The pedagogy of fundamentals such as the ability to be perceptually sensitive and conceptually productive were studied. The types of features and relations an expert perceives in an external representation at hand were embodied with expertize. The acquisition of expertize could be regarded as a process of becoming able to perceive what was not evident previously and conceive an impossible thing. It was found that the program worked effectively to let people acquire the ability of constructive perception through meta-cognition.

Fostering better performance in a creative experience is an issue in every institution of design or art. What aspect does a creative experience possess and what kind of cognitive processes constitute it? How should students be trained to entertain the use of cognitive skills, if any, in building up a creative experience of their own? The purpose of the present paper is to examine these issues to lay the foundation for the pedagogy of a creative experience. Examining the cognitive processes of an experienced architect, we found that a creative experience has the aspect of problem-finding; an act of formulating one's own problems and resolving them rather than just solving a presented problem. Further, we found that a coordination of both perceptual reorganization and conceptual generation constitutes an act of problem-finding in a creative experience. Experiments using ambiguous drawings have shown that coordinating one's own perception and conception for inventing novel interpretations requires a cognitive skill, what we call the skill of constructive perception; that is, to be self-aware of the way perception underlies the current interpretation and thereby reorganize perception and generate novel interpretations. How to help students master this skill and how to design educational programs to allow for accomplishment of acts of problem-finding will be discussed.

Designers, during a conceptual design process, do not just synthesize solutions that satisfy initially given requirements, but also invent design issues or requirements that capture important aspects of the given problem. How do they do this? What becomes the impetus for the invention of important issues or requirements? So-called `unexpected discoveries', the acts of attending to visuo-spatial features in sketches which were not intended when they were drawn, are believed to contribute to it. The purpose of the present research is to verify this hypothesis. Analyzing the cognitive processes of a practising architect in a design session, we found that in about a half of his entire design process there were bi-directional relations between unexpected discoveries and the invention of issues or requirements. Not only did unexpected discoveries become the driving force for the invention of issues or requirements, but also the occurrence of invention, in turn, tended to cause new unexpected discoveries. This has provided empirical evidence for two anecdotal views of designing. First, designing is a situated act; designers invent design issues or requirements in a way situated in the environment in which they design. We call inventions of this sort situated-invention (S-invention). Secondly, a design process progresses in such a way that the problem-space and the solution-space co-evolve. Further, this has brought a pedagogical implication as well as an insight about an important aspect of learning by experience in design.