Collaborators: Ellen Yi-Luen, Bennett Neiman, Craig Zimring

Designers use drawings to explore alternatives and to test ideas. We report here on two studies on design and drawing. The first study of design drawing symbols aims to determine whether and to what extent it is possible to infer, interpret, or even guess what a designer was thinking about by looking at the drawings she has made. In the second study, we examined a collection of drawings for the design of a house to investigate the systems of design transformation. Drawings are characterized by drawing style, projection type, and key elements. We analyzed the relationships among the drawings and developed a notation system for documenting these relationships.

1999 Drawing and Design Intentions — an Investigation of Freehand Drawing Conventions in Design, E. Do, M.D. Gross, and C. Zimring, in Proceedings Design Thinking Research Symposium, G. Goldschmidt and W. Porter, eds., Cambridge MA, pp. 1-10. [pdf]

1999 Sketches and Their Functions in Early Design: A Retrospective Analysis of Two Houses, Neiman, B. Do, E. and M.D. Gross. In Proceedings Design Thinking Research Symposium, G. Goldschmidt and W. Porter, eds., Cambridge MA, pp. 255-266. [pdf]

1997 Inferring Design Intentions from Sketches, Do, E. and M.D. Gross, Proceedings of Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia ’97, pp. 217-227. [pdf]