Questioning design tools in the early stage of architectural design process: Pen and paper vs. digital sketching

Architectural design has a special position in architecture education. It is the main and most effective study area to develop architecture student's design skill and knowledge. In the architectural design, designer focuses more on the conceptual stage of design. This stage is different from other phases of design process and provides fields that designer manipulates the design problem and generates and explores new ideas. Early stage of design generally begins with sketches and diagrams (referred to as traditional media) to explore ideas and solutions. The freehand sketch plays important role in design process by facilitating problem solving, generating ideas and externalizing them. The ambiguity and vagueness of conventional freehand sketching can be a source of creativity. Nowadays, with the advances in digital technology, there are attempts to integrate digital tools with the early phases of design in order to make a digital design media in the architectural education. Recent developments in CAAD software shows a shift in focus toward conceptual design interface; but these tools have not developed and still fail to offer an appropriate design environment for sketching. Therefore, the application of digital tools has created debates among design instructors and researchers; the main point of these discussions is that computer software may impede the creative behaviors and this can lead to poor and non-creative design by students. So can be concluded that, architectural education in application of digital tools in the early design stages are facing problems and challenges especially regarding creativity. This study focuses on conceptual design process and aims: firstly, to find out the relationship between conventional sketching and creativity, the current status of digital sketching and interface and whether it can replace traditional sketching in educational context. In experimental study, the digital based sketching is compared and evaluated with pen and paper sketching from creativity point of view via protocol analysis method and linkography, and whether it can enhance the creativity of students. The findings emphasis on the strong relationship between creativity and conventional sketching method and show that there are attempts to create design interface to simulate pen and paper sketching features at digital medium for support creative design. As a conclusion, the findings of the empirical study also stressed out that designers in pen and paper sketching had richer design process and more opportunities for idea generation versus the digital sessions, and consequently they had more creative and productive design process. However, digital sketching depending on its nature can enable designers to make interconnectivity of ideas and create the number of different ideas, if they have sufficient experience and skills in digital sketching software.