The roles of design representations in architectural design thinking

This study aims to uncover the interrelated roles of design representations in design thinking, and their comparative contributions to the overall design thinking addressing the following questions, why designer switches to another medium to generate a new representation, what are the particular contributions of different design mediums to the overall design thinking, and how different mediums correspond to each other in means of exploring design ideas. Two retrospective interview with vonlunteer designers were conducted to study interrelations of design representations and their comparative contributions to design thinking. Two graduate architecture students were participated in the study. They were functioning in the same design studio, dealing with the same design task and getting critiques from the same professor. Their design representations that they had produced during the semester project, were documented. At the end of their design process, individual interview sessions were conducted with the participants and they were asked to give detailed descriptions regarding to their design process in the framework of the facilitation of their design representations. In the study, the design activity is described as a problem-solving activity that the designer explores the problem space and the solution space by interacting with design representations. A visualization network map, relation map, was develop to formulate and encode the design process, that subjects provided, to compare their cases. It is intended to model designers' strategies of design medium conducting in particular phases of design activity; problem exploration and structuring, solution exploration and structuring and most importantly problem-solution framing. Relation map is formed by two network maps, which is emulated to linkograph, placed in opposite directions to each other (1st quadrant and 4th quadrant of the coordinate plane), sliding on top of each other enabling transitions between problem space to solution space where the problem-solution integraty pairs appear on a third section of the network map. By this specific adaptation, all three types of structuring could be detected and analyzed. Thereby, different design processes as well as different partial processes from one design process could be compared with each other. Out of this comparison, the roles and contributions of design representations were discussed. Addressing to the impetus to change the design medium a particular case of facilitation of printout was discussed. Both designers made a formal interpretation while sketching over a printout, and on the adapted linkograph problem-solution chunk and webs occurred indicating a problem framing. It has been concluded that the medium of sketching enables the designer expand on the design entity and encounter novel aspects, which they could not forseen while working with CAD tools, on their sketches to develop connections between problem space and the solution space thanks to the ambiguous nature of sketching. The cases demonstrated that the medium of model-making, and/or interacting with a physical model allows designer to explore the design entity not only by seeing, but also with touching. By this tabgible process, designers could either re-structure a part of geometry that they could not easily achieve without bodily knowing, or reveal a specific information regaring to the design entity. In the former, the formal interpretation was performed directly by formal re-structuring. In the latter, the designer generated an abstract information by the facilitation of the physical model. But, it was still ambiguous and not externalized. Therefore, the designer chose to externalize it through sketching, which is much faster and sufficient to deliver such ambiguity. This process to structure formal interpretation was categorized as indirect. In the study, therefore, two distict formal interpretation was tracked and categorized according to desinger's facilitation by the design representations. A wider perspective was provided with the comparison of two cases discussing the contributions of analogue design mediums and digital design mediums. The design process which was executed with higly manual mediums e.g. sketching, free-hand drawing, model-making, illustrates a comprehensive and divergent design thinking. On the other hand, the design process which was executed by higly CAD tools draw rather weak and incomprehensive design thinking. It is concluded that, analogue mediums provide much more fuzziness that the designer could widely interact with and produce extensive connections compared to CAD mediums. Another critic conclusion, however, is that CAD tools provide the ability of analyzing one particular aspect regarding to the physical environment thoroughly. All in all, this thesis intiates to unveil the interrelations of design representations and their relative contributiouns to design thinking in its natural flow (not in a set-up design task). The findings in the cases were discussed in order to explaine the types of facilitations by different mediums and the reasons behind the designer's decision to experiment with another design medium discussing the interrelations of design representations and the conduct of the complexity of design representations.