Abstract

This article presents the outcomes of a semiotic and cognitive analysis. The activities’ tracks of dissertations’ writing and artefacts’ design made by undergraduate design students were observed. Although the requirements of the dissertations’ writing are ambiguous, the activity of writing “increases” the activity of design and consequently widens the design skill. Because they provide new knowledge reorganizing the scientific and pragmatic concepts of the design by a process of “creative conflict”, the kinds of produced operational texts contribute to the renewal of the abstract inheritances of the design and to the transformation of the activity and the professional situations.