Jestlerin konuşma ile konuşmasız olarak şekillerin temsili için kullanımı üzerine mimarlarla bir çalışma

Conceptual design occupies a crucial place in architectural design process. Designers tend to quickly express, convey and externalize their design ideas to the external world. At the same time, they want to make them visible with the purpose of working on them. Thus, when these ideas became visible, architects could have the opportunity to think about, inspect and improve them. Using hands while explaining a spatial problem frequently can be observed in architectural statements and design communication, because of the rapid and intuitive nature of the hand motions-gestures. Gestures have a significant role in explaining spatial information very quickly and effectively, because they are spatial. Furthermore, gestures are very suitable mediums for expressing 3D representations, because they occupy a 3D space, and they are three-dimensional by nature. Accordingly, gestures have been studied in various fields, but particularly in spatial domain. Two of these fields constituted a source of motivation for this thesis. The first one is 'use of gesture in design communication' and the second one is 'gesture as input medium in HCI' (human computer interaction). In this thesis, -instructed- hand gestures that architects used in modeling a given set of shapes/configurations were investigated by an empirical study for exploring their gestural modeling behavior and understanding (1) how the shapes were modeled by gestures, (2) to what extent architects can represent a shape/form via gestures, (3) what shape/form information was conveyed via gestures and/or speech. This investigation was executed under two different circumstances, which are gesture-only and gesture-plus-speech. In the gesture-only circumstance, participants were requested to model sixteen shapes/configurations by using their gestures and were not allowed to speak. In the gesture-plus-speech circumstance, participants were requested to model another set of sixteen shapes/configurations with their gestures and were informed that they can speak if they like to. All of these studies' data were gathered via camcorders and observations were analyzed by segmenting to the protocols with regards to the gestures produced. In consequence of all these investigations, gestures, which were produced by the participants during the modeling process, were analyzed to seek answers to the research questions. During the analyses, some simple sketches of the represented shapes/configurations were also drawn while videotapes of the participants were being watched in order to seek whether the shapes/configurations can be fully captured from the videos. In these qualitative analyses, it was observed that architects generally exhibited some similar behaviors during the modeling of similar forms. Some participants generated gestural models, which contain all of the shape information holistically. If shape was not modelled as giving all the data about its' characteristic features, it was difficult to understand whole shape from the videos. It was observed that there were several gesture-speech mis-matches produced by the participants during the gestural modeling process where information given by speech was different than what was rendered by the hands yet in other cases, speech was often found to give complementary information about distance, size and/or measure of the physical models efficiently. Finally, a comment can be added that participants tried to find the correct word and to form a meaningful sentence mentally while generating gesture-speech models in the gesture-plus-speech phases. Because of this process, their hands hung in the air and they hesitated about the next motions of their hands. So, if speech was dysfluent, gesture was interrupted as well. However, in the gesture-only phases, a great majority of the participants' gestural models were more holistic, complete and fluent. As a result of these investigations and analyses, it can be suggested that gestural modeling via hand motions can be a representative and communicative medium between architects to a certain extent. Architects can model some primitive shapes with their gestures and they can be encouraged for using gestures in design communication for representing some primitive shapes. For the case of human computer interaction, with the technological developments in the near future, it might be possible to define some shapes/configurations to a computer system via gestures.