Investigating on the re-use of conceptual design representations

Systematic conceptual design approaches foresee the realization of abstract representations, according to their specific formalisms and rationales. Therefore, even if not explicitly conceived for this purpose, they implicitly allow to store information about the explored design space. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the re-use of the recalled representation is unclear, especially if reused by designers not comprehensively learned about the original method. This paper shows an experimental investigation on this argument, where a sample of thirty-five MS engineering students is involved.