Sketching interpretation in novice and expert designers

This paper focuses on the differences in visual reasoning between a novice and an expert architectural designer during the conceptual design process. The cognitive actions of each designer while sketching were categorized into four main groups (each consisting of a number of sub-groups): physical, perceptual, functional, and conceptual. Based on this analysis, we found that the expert differs markedly from the novice in productivity in terms of the number of sketches and the number of alternative ideas. We focused on the differences between them in terms of the frequencies of cognitive actions, with the hypothesis that the difference in productivity could be attributed to the differences in some or all types of cognitive actions. Differences between the expert and the novice were found for revising features (in the subcategory of drawing actions in the physical action category), for paying attention to the relations of depicted elements (perceptual category) and for the rates of new and revisited functions (functional category). These results are discussed in terms of the types of visual reasoning processes that could be involved in expert design and the possible implications of these results if they can be demonstrated to be characteristic of expert designers generally.