Sketching as mental imagery processing

2006

This research is concerned with conceptual sketches, visual perception and verbal description. Firstly, it focuses on the role of sketching in conceptual design and begins to question why conceptual sketches are considered a good medium for reflective conversation with one's own ideas and imagery. Secondly, it focuses exclusively on the mental process involved in the analysis and verbal description of conceptual sketches. The empirical study examines how novice and expert designers might perceive different things from the same conceptual sketch and thus use different verbal descriptions, and what this might reveal about their different approaches to design. For this reason some experiments on visual perception, conceptual sketches and verbal description were conducted with expert and novice architecture students. The main objective is to verify to what extent the use of formal references such as line, square or circle and symbolic references such as describing a circle as a sun or a long oval as a sausage, help to understand how designers might think with sketches, while searching for a specific design solution. It also investigates which of the two types of images (non-architectural and architectural sketches) present greater potential for allowing the use of formal and symbolic verbal references, and why. The results show that, on average, the expert group used more formal and symbolic verbal references per minute than novices while describing the same images. The results also show that the non-architectural sketch was judged as easier to describe than the architectural one and gave rise to the use of more symbolic references. This can be seen to confirm earlier work suggesting that we find symbolic descriptions easier and more powerful than formal ones. The results also suggest that the expert students were more able to employ symbolic references to architectural concepts than the novice students. However, in many other respects there were few differences between the groups. This may in part be due to the limitations of the empirical methodology employed.

Sketch as a Tool of Visual Ideation from the Design Perspective, 2022

This manuscript examines and explains the role of sketching as part of the creative design process, especially during its concept phase, when the new idea/solution is formed. The main focus of the study is the visual form of ideation, known as “sketching." This thesis also presents examples of practical ideation sketching techniques, analyses them, proposes the scientific explanation of mental mechanics behind them, and provides the perspective of cognitive psychology. Opening research includes a review of the current understanding and positioning of ideation sketching and the literature that covers the given subject. It validates these findings with an online survey, followed by interviews with twenty experienced professionals in the field of car and entertainment design. This research is intended primarily for students and creative practitioners of disciplines such as design or architecture; however, the content can likely be beneficial in a broader context despite the resources and examples typical for these disciplines. Last but not least, the work concludes with a critical evaluation of the research results, addresses the lack of shared understanding and terminology, and proposes a systematic approach to ideation sketching at the level of practical exercises and formal education. Keywords: Design, ideation, sketching, concept, design research, research for design, creative cognition, cognitive psychology, creativity, education, art

The computer, the new media, reaches out and influences the behavior of design as it does almost every facet of life. In recent years, much research into the development of computer-aided design has looked at the concept generation stage of the design process. Most of these applied studies have focused on the testing of computer systems. On the other hand, there are also many studies on the visual thinking and cognitive behavior of designers while sketching or drawing in the stage of concept generation. From the synthesis of the two aforementioned disciplines, we can find that there exists a point of deficiency. That is, the cognitive research about designers using computers as sketching media is absent. It is this area that is discussed in the current paper. The fundamental analytic data of this research is the visual process chronicled from the sketching of subjects. The analytic data is the verbal data from the questions that the subjects are asked after sketching. The data is analyzed using three coding schemes. The cognitive appearance while designers generating concepts with computers or conventional media are propounded and discussed in this research. q 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

Design Studies, 2003

Studies have suggested that there are significant relations between designers' cognitive activities and their conceptual sketches and that these relations affect the creativity of the design solutions. In this paper, we investigate these relations using the visual reasoning model developed for understanding and analyzing the sketching processes taking place in conceptual design. A case study of three designers is presented in order to provide an insight into the various cognitive characteristics of individual designers and their creativity in generating concepts.

Design Studies, 1998

T his paper is concerned with sketches and sketching and in particular the structure of sketching behaviour. The term sketch is used to cover such a subtle variety of images and processes that consensus is by no means guaranteed. We can probably agree that a sketch is a freehand drawing. However, this is unlikely to capture what a sketch means to most artists or designers. People talk about landscape and portrait sketches, i.e. sketches of real objects. Here it's the properties of the freehand drawing which seem to characterise the sketch-its vagueness, its incompleteness, its ambiguity, the way it captures the essence of form and space, the fluency of its production, etc. People also talk about sketches 0142-694X/98 $-see front matter Design Studies 19 (1998) 485-517 485 PII: S0142-694X(98)00012-X This paper describes a study designed to investigate the structure of idea sketches, here defined as the initial free-hand drawn externalisations produced by a designer of envisioned or partially envisioned entities. In the study, participants were asked to sketch freely from memory a number of chairs and to design a chair. The results obtained from analyzing the drawing process provide clear evidence for structure in idea sketching behaviour which is largely explained by reference to either volumetrical or functional cognitive models of the recalled or designed objects. This suggests that there is an intimate relationship between the cognitive and perceptual processes that are brought to bear on the recall and design tasks and idea sketching. It is concluded that the detailed study of sketching behaviour may provide a fruitful approach to understanding the relationship between cognition, the sketch, and sketching.

International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2000

Previous research by one of the authors showed that novice designers do not use sketching as a way to generate, develop and communicate design proposals, but move immediately to three-dimensional modelling. Neither do they generate multiple solutions.

Sketching holds significance for graphic design as well as it does in any other design process. The contribution of sketching to graphic design process comes in the form of generating new ideas and developing concepts. The solution of a design problem will not be the best one, if the designer uses technological tools, such as computers, directly in order to solve the design problem. The significance of sketching includes also the graphic design education. Even though computers are the mostly used tools in today's graphic design education, students should grasp the benefits of sketching. In this study, the role played in creative process by sketches that students do related to their projects during a course that is in the curriculum of a university's Graphics Department will be discussed.

Design Computing and Cognition '08, 2008

This paper shows that expert architects can effectively develop ideas without sketching during early conceptual designing. We analysed design protocols of six expert architects working on two different design problems under two different conditions, one in which they were blindfolded and one in which they were sketching. Architects developed design ideas efficiently when they were blindfolded, as opposed to the common view that they would better develop ideas with sketching.

Proc. 3rd Int. Conf. Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design, 2004

Abstract. Research in cognitive psychology and in design thinking has shown that inner representation is a powerful strategy that designers can use, and use, in solving design problems. Generating external representations by way of sketching is instrumental in problem-structuring and was found to be particularly momentous in creative performance. In this paper we look at the'consumption'of external visual representations, thought of as stimuli, when those are present in the designer's work environment. The empirical study ...