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This thesis describes research carried to investigate the evidence of design heuristics and their role in the design ideation process. Design heuristics are guidelines that help the designer to consider areas of possible designs that may not otherwise come to mind during the idea generation stage. The research is cross-disciplinary bringing findings, methods, and perspectives from cognitive psychology to product design domain. The exploratory research work undertaken has produced a list of design heuristics that are commonly used by designers in generating diverse concepts, inspiring design ideas that in turn affect the design outputs produced through the creative design process. By combining content analysis of real-world examples of expert designs and investigation of expert and novice designers’ decision processes through case studi...