The cover

PhD student, and now Dr. Andre Neumann, made the cover together with his girlfriend, Sylvie Thues, using strings of wool of different colours, representing a number of designers. Their ideas, depicted as a pattern of threads between the nails, should converge and end up as one entity (the ball of wool in the right hand corner).
In his PhD research at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering,
Neumann studied the sharing of concepts between designers. The basic idea behind shared mental models comes from psychology, Neumann says, but its application to the design practice is new. Designers share their ideas by talking and also by drawing.
The importance of sharing ideas depends on the phase that a project is in, says Neumann. In the earlier stages of design, where divergent ideas are welcome for exploring the various possibilities, sharing concepts is less important than in the later stages. In the end phase, where a convergence of ideas is needed to end up with a definitive design, a clear concept-sharing is of utmost importance.

Andre Neumann, ‘Designerly ways of sharing’, 17 February 2012, PhD supervisor Prof. Petra Badke-Schaub (IDE)