Design representations

So important has drawing become in the design process that virtually every contemporary design curriculum places considerable emphasis on the acquisition of skills in drawing. Schools of design will generally go to considerablelengths to teach drawing methods and develop drawing skills in their students.

This is usually thought so important and basic that it invariably starts right at the very beginning of the course. There are therefore now many good books to support these courses and among them a whole series by Tom Porter who has taught in schools of architecture for many years.
 In their primer on graphic techniques Tom Porter and Sue Goodman (1988) claim that ‘in the wake of rapidly advancing computer-graphics technology, drawing by hand remains undisturbed as the central activity in the process of design’.
Porter and Goodman’s claim is certainly supported by the arguments in this book. Exploring designers’ drawings is an excellent way to further our understanding of what designers know.


In terms of modern cognitive theory we must assume that there is some sort of correspondence between what is happening in the designer’s mind and the representation that is made in the drawing. That representation may have a number of purposes as we shall see soon, but in each case it seems reasonable
to suppose that it serves those purposes best the more closely the representation in the drawing matches the knowledge used by the designer.
Thus drawings may be seen as a kind of window into the designer’s mind and consequently into the designer’s knowledge system and method of mental representation.
It turns out that designer’s drawings present cognitive theorists with a very considerable challenge in accounting for this connection between external representation and internal mental structure.
We saw how contemporary cognitive science is turning to explore design and in particular how
this attention is focused on the nature of design drawings.
Vinod Goel (1995) talked of meeting a ‘vertical wall’ when trying to understand design. It seems to be in the examination of the drawings that designers habitually do that we most obviously run into Goel’s ‘vertical wall’.
 The symbol systems used in these drawings are so open, variable, flexible and apparently indecipherable, and yet are clearly the very basis of thinking that they challenge the very idea of a symbolic language of thought as cognitive science can currently explain it. One of the problems facing us is that designers produce many different kinds of drawings for several different purposes.
Each of these types of drawings has its own characteristics as well as purpose. Mostly when we look at them we can easily recognize the type of drawing in front of us, and yet just how we do this remains unclear.

It would seem unlikely that we could write a computer program to perform this recognition task, never mind understanding the actual content of the drawing.

In terms of modern cognitive theory we must assume that there is some sort of correspondence between what is happening in the designer’s mind and the representation that is made in the drawing.
That representation may have a number of purposes as we shall see soon, but in each case it seems reasonable to suppose that it serves those purposes best the more closely the representation in the drawing matches the knowledge used by the designer. Thus drawings may be seen as a kind of window into the designer’s mind and consequently into the designer’s knowledge system and method of mental representation.
It turns out that designer’s drawings present cognitive theorists with a very considerable challenge in accounting for this connection between external representation and internal mental structure. we saw how contemporary cognitive science is turning to explore design and in particular how this attention is focused on the nature of design drawings.

Vinod Goel (1995) talked of meeting a ‘vertical wall’ when trying to understand design. It seems to be in the examination of the drawings that designers habitually do that we most obviously run into Goel’s ‘vertical wall’.
The symbol systems used in these drawings are so open, variable, flexible and apparently indecipherable, and yet are clearly the very basis of thinking that they challenge the very idea of a symbolic language of thought as cognitive science can currently explain it. One of the problems facing us is that designers produce many different kinds of drawings for several different purposes. Each of these types of drawings has its own characteristics as well as purpose.
 Mostly when we look at them we can easily recognize the type of drawing in front of us, and yet just
how we do this remains unclear. It would seem unlikely that we could write a computer program to perform this recognition task, never mind understanding the actual content of the drawing.