ABSTRACT
References to previous designs and other objects play an important role in the synthesis of new design ideas, but object references are used for a wide variety of other purposes in design thinking. This chapter reports on the roles that object references played in design meetings in projects developing two very different products: a crematorium, and a hand-held device with a thermal print head for drawing on heat-sensitive paper. These roles depended on the moment-to-moment needs of the participants in the meetings, which varied rapidly within meetings, and which were determined largely by the type of product and the state of the project. Almost all the references used were concise identifiers of concepts or features, or exemplars of categories.
