Wing C. Lau was born in Hong Kong SAR, China. He received the B.E.E. degree (with distinction) and the M.S.E.E. degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 2000 and 2002. Mr. Lau was the recipient of Harting scholarship and the president of Eta Kappa Nu, Omicron Chapter (99-00). His research experience included working with the Minnesota Department of Transportation in the data mining and processing areas, land-mobile-satellite channel modeling and digital communication over fading channels. Upon graduation, he worked in the biomedical instrumentation and magnetic sensing areas. In 2003, he joined School of Design, the HKPolyU as a research associate to develop various tangible interaction prototypes and haptic programming interfaces for children. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at School of Design investigating design brief formulations and design performance. Mr. Lau is the co-inventor of two HK short term patents related to applied tangible interfaces research.
 
Research Title:
Relating design brief abstraction and design expertise to design performance

PhD Advisor:
Dr Thomas Fischer

A design brief is typically the first piece of information available to designers in a project. The precision (abstraction levels) of design briefs have shown to influence designer's performance. "A more abstract level is characterized through a reduced level of detail in the representation and abstract levels model the world in a less precise way, but still capture certain, important properties." "Since there is a close relationship between problem and solution, varied statements of the same problem evolve different solutions." What however is little understood today is the dependence of designer's performance from presented problem abstraction levels and design expertise. Previous findings made outside of the design domain indicate that both novices and experts excel when working from their preferred understandings of the problem. Experts tend to form abstract representations (what something does) while novices tend to form concrete representations (how something is done). Studies of design expertise have also shown that one major difference between expert and novice designers is their preferred levels of abstraction when solving problems and these representations subsequently affect designers' problem framing, goal definition, solution searching, and the quality of the design outcomes. This study aims to determine the appropriate abstraction levels of design briefs associated with given levels of design expertise. Findings and their implications will be discussed in relation to applications in the design industry and in design education where briefs are presented to designers with known levels of expertise.

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