Engineering systems are represented in a variety of physical, graphical, and virtual ways, supporting decision making about the systems and their operation. As part of a larger research endeavor exploring influences of representation modality, the presented work examines how product identification impacts subsystem clustering behavior. This is achieved through a study using pictorial and functional representations of common household products. Participants were tasked with grouping elements into non-overlapping clusters. Results suggest that correctly identifying a product does not affect clustering behavior regardless of representation modality. This implies that other aspects of the representations are impacting partition convergence. These factors, along with connections to prior work are explored as discussion points and areas of future research.
