Research Project

Characterizing Design Decisions with LLMs

Use LLMs to identify design decisions and the factors that influence them from qualitative text (e.g., interviews, design notebooks, reports). One outcome is constructing causal influence diagrams that represent decisions and relationships.

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Seed Project (Unfunded)Unfunded2025–2026SeedActiveOpen for Students

Research Question

Build an ingestion and extraction pipeline for design texts (interviews, logs, reports)

Approach

  • Build an ingestion and extraction pipeline for design texts (interviews, logs, reports)
  • Develop a schema for decisions, factors, and dependencies; prototype LLM-assisted labeling and evaluate vs. expert annotations
  • Generate causal influence diagrams from extracted structures and validate with participants
  • Release coding guidelines, samples, and a reproducible workflow