Sketching and visual perception in conceptual design : case studies of novice and expert architecture students.

摘要

This research is concerned with conceptual sketches, visual perception andudverbal description. Firstly, it focuses on the role of sketching in conceptual design andudbegins to question why conceptual sketches are considered a good medium for reflectiveudconversation with one's own ideas and imagery. Secondly, it focuses exclusively on theudmental process involved in the analysis and verbal description of conceptual sketches.udThe empirical study examines how novice and expert designers might perceiveuddifferent things from the same conceptual sketch and thus use different verbaluddescriptions, and what this might reveal about their different approaches to design. Forudthis reason some experiments on visual perception, conceptual sketches and verbaluddescription were conducted with expert and novice architecture students.udThe main objective is to verify to what extent the use of formal references suchudas line, square or circle and symbolic references such as describing a circle as a sun or audlong oval as a sausage, help to understand how designers might think with sketches,udwhile searching for a specific design solution. It also investigates which of the two typesudof images (non-architectural and architectural sketches) present greater potential forudallowing the use of formal and symbolic verbal references, and why.udThe results show that, on average, the expert group used more formal andudsymbolic verbal references per minute than novices while describing the same images.udThe results also show that the non-architectural sketch was judged as easier to describeudthan the architectural one and gave rise to the use of more symbolic references. Thisudcan be seen to confirm earlier work suggesting that we fmd symbolic descriptions easierudand more powerful than formal ones. The results also suggest that the expert studentsudwere more able to employ symbolic references to architectural concepts than noviceudstudents.udHowever, in many other respects there were few differences between theudgroups. This may in part be due to the limitations of the empirical methodologyudemployed.