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

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 fmd 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 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.