Affordances—the action possibilities provided by the environment—are a central notion in ecological psychology, offering valuable insights into dynamic user-environment interactions. In recent years, affordance theory has gained traction in architecture and design for its potential to illuminate how users perceive and engage with built environments, informing both design thinking and performance evaluation. Despite this growing interest, its application within architectural design research remains limited. This article introduces an affordance-based evaluation framework developed to analyze how built environments enable or constrain adaptive user behaviors. Grounded in ecological psychology and architectural theory, the framework provides a structured approach for assessing usability, anticipating behavioral variability, and aligning design outcomes with diverse user needs. By explicitly linking architectural intention with situated user-environment interaction, the framework contributes a design-oriented methodology for improving responsiveness, inclusivity, and the adaptive capacity of the built environment throughout its lifecycle. • Introduces an affordance-based framework for architectural design evaluation. • Bridges the architectural intention with adaptive user-environment interaction. • Integrates ecological psychology and architectural theory for design analysis. • Supports usability, inclusivity, and adaptability across the building lifecycle. • Provides a structured method to align design outcomes with user behavior.

This study explores an experiential learning approach in basic design education by integrating observations of the real world to improve students' learning motivation, self-efficacy, and performance. A quasi-experiment with 28 first-year industrial design students used a single-group pre- and post-test design over a nine-week studio. The short course included four learning units on natural observation for pattern analysis and shape reconstruction. Learning outcomes were assessed through scales, rubrics, T tests and regression analysis, while qualitative feedback was analyzed through text clouds. The results indicated an improvement in self-efficacy but mixed motivation for learning, probably due to the challenges in the reconstruction of shapes using generative rules and CAD tools. Students showed strong interest in field observation and generative rule exploration. The approach has positively influenced self-efficacy and learning performance. Future improvements include the alignment of tasks with the previous knowledge of students, the integration of user-friendly generative AI tools and the introduction of systematic problem-solving methods. • This experiential learning foundation effectively helps students learn through natural observation, pattern analysis, and generative simulations. • Students' self-efficacy and academic performance improved but faced challenges with shape reconstruction and computational tools. • Scaffolding, AI tools, and structured problem-solving can enhance motivation and ease technical difficulties.

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have created new opportunities for incorporating AI into creative activities. Consequently, AI has become an increasingly significant tool in the design process, changing traditional workflows. This paper explores AI's role as both a co-creator and a design material, focusing on its impact on the ideation and evaluation stages of the design process. Through a transdisciplinary literature review, this study reveals that AI enhances creativity by providing inspirational stimuli, and supports evaluation and decision-making. However, it also introduces complexities such as cognitive overload and dependency. This paper emphasizes the need for design education reform, and training students as Designer Arbiters and Integrators to effectively collaborate with AI in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. • AI's role as co-creator and design material brings opportunities and challenges. • AI enhances creativity by promoting cognitive flexibility in the design process. • Cognitive overload and dependency are risks of over-relying on AI in design. • Design education must train students to be “Designer Arbiters” and “Integrators”.

In product design engineering, ideation involves producing ideas for new products that fulfil functional requirements. Ideation is associated with activity in multiple regions across the brain. However, knowledge about how these regions interact is limited. In an fMRI study of professional product design engineers (n = 30), we examined neural regions activated during ideation compared with three control conditions (rest, working memory and visuospatial processing). Using Psychophysiological Interactions analysis, we identified increased functional connectivity between five regions of interest and other areas. This included functional coupling between regions of the executive control and salience networks, and the default mode and visual networks. Connectivity between the lingual gyrus and cerebellum also suggests an interplay of visual and motor imagery during ideation.

Managing ideas is a central activity of professional designers and an essential element in the creative design process. However, while designers use a diverse range of tools to capture, manage, and recollect ideas, they often lack wellestablished and proven efficient routines for doing so. To better understand how these idea-centered design processes play out and, potentially, might be improved, we conducted a longitudinal study with ten professional designers where we deployed a technology probe in the form of an app, Recollect, to explore critical aspects of their idea management practices. Based on weekly interviews, we contribute four central insights, which pairwise form two current tensions related to idea capture and idea recollection among designers. These two tensions are that 1) designers have similar conceptions of what constitutes a good design idea, but have very diverse practices for working with ideas; and that 2) designers find value in revisiting ideas, but lack structured and efficient approaches for doing so. We discuss the implications of these findings, and we propose that the complexity of designers' idea management practices call for more research.