Research is concerned with communication of design thinking, from the perspective of a designer, and in relation to the process, product, and user experience of design. It is a study of the act of persuasion within the processof a designer’s thinking, and is concerned with interpretation of the relation between words and images. The role of technology, intuition, and visual thinking are identified as three key components of design thought, and the way these three constituent parts inter-relate is the subject matter of inquiry. Research is conducted from a theoretical and practical perspective, and throughout the inquiry, a balance between subjective and objective informationis retained. An essentially holistic approach to understanding the designer’s decision-making process is adopted, and as such, the research does not separate the act of thinking from the act of doing. The inquiry concentrates on exposing the tacit dialogue of a designer througha series of five discourses. Each discourse begins with a preface, a contextual statement that frames the line of inquiry. The first discourse introduces the research methodology; discourse two reviews the literature surrounding communication of design thinking, and observes the design process through documentation and communication of 97 examples; discourse three interviews five professional designers and listens to how they visually communicate the physical and emotional experience of being a designer; discourse four questions a designer’s tacit understanding of visual thinking and exposes the surrounding assumptions, and the fifth discourse closes this inquiry by communicating the activity of rhetoric, describing rhetoric as the relation and inter-relation between the implicit and explicit processes of looking, listening and questioning. The visual methodology provides a context that allows the designer’s qualitiesof judgement and experience to become subjects in themselves. Each discourse attends to the unfolding nature of a network of relationships that developed amongst the roles of intuition, visual thinking and technology. In doing so, the inquiry proposes to contribute to knowledge by: communicating the significance of visual thinking as a methodology for doctoral design research; the role of computer technology as a tool for looking, listening and questioning the activityof rhetoric; intuition as a facilitator of rhetoric and rhetoric as an interrogator of intuition.

Dans cette thèse, nous abordons la conception des composants d'électronique de puissance, intégrés sur semi-conducteur. Dans cette large problématique, nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement aux méthodes et outils logiciels et numériques pour le dimensionnement technologique et géométrique. Ainsi, nous abordons le dimensionnement en faisant des compromis d'intégration entre la technologie du composant de puissance et les fonctions électriques de ses composants annexes, en prenant en compte la fiabilité de la réalisation technologique en salle blanche et les impacts de l'environnement électronique. Pour cela, nous avons proposé des démarches, méthodes et outils pour repousser les limites existantes de la conception, visant à offrir le support correspondant en terme de « design kit ». Finalement, nous appliquons les méthodes et les démarches choisies et développées, au dimensionnement d'un MOSFET de puissance (VDMOS), pour différents cahiers des charges. / The thesis deals with the design of integrated power electronics components. In this large problematic, the thesis focuses on the methods and numerical and software tools for the geometrical and technological sizing. So, the thesis deals with the sizing carrying out compromises between the technology of a power component and the electrical characteristics of its auxiliary components, taking into account the reliability of the technological making and the impacts of the electronic environment. In this way, approaches, methods and tools are proposed to push away the existing design limits, to offer the corresponding elements for the design kit. Finally, the developed and chosen methods and approaches are applied to the sizing of a power MOSFET (VDMOS) according to several cases of specifications