Types of drawings

Even a preliminary examination of designers’ drawings will reveal that there are many different types of drawings involved. The first step in developing our understanding therefore must be to attempt some form of classification of designers’ drawings.

In fact Fraser and Henmi (1994) have already analysed specifically architectural drawings and suggested a classification system which offers a starting point.
They identified five types of drawings which they called ‘referential drawings’, ‘diagrams’, ‘design drawings’, ‘presentation drawings’ and ‘visionary drawings’.  This is an interesting and useful taxonomy but one which is largely based on analysis of the characteristics of drawings.
Here we need a slightly more elaborate taxonomy based on the way in which knowledge is being manipulated in the minds of the member of the design team and communicated to other participants.
What is important here is that each of these kinds of drawings has its own set of rules. Such rules are clearly part of the knowledge that designers work with and yet they remain largely implicit.
One of the problems with graphical communication is that unless the viewer knows how to interpret the drawing components, considerable misunderstanding can result. Because the knowledge about drawing types is largely implicit rather than explicitly discussed designers may easily fail to communicate knowledge to others as accurately as they think.

Of course some of these types of drawings may not be intended to communicate to others at all but rather to be part of the internal working of the designer or design team. These drawings are of considerable interest to us here.
We shall therefore here investigate a range of types of drawings including presentation drawings, instruction drawings, consultation drawings, experiential drawings, diagrams, fabulous drawings, proposition drawings and calculation drawings.
 An added complexity here is that although these types have distinguishable characteristics
any one drawing may contain features of more than one type.