Methodology of Design Experiment and Analysis of Drawing Processes.

In this paper, we discuss the method of design experiments that is an experimental technique to obtain practical information of design processes, and furthermore we show an analysis on drawing processes using the results of design experiments. First, we describe the method of design experiments that is based on protocol analysis. Then we examine the experimental environments of twelve experiments that we performed in this research. Although protocol analysis mainly concerns verbal information, drawing information is also important in design. We developed an experimental drawing system to improve the method to record drawings and drawing processes. Second, we analyze drawing processes with the drawing information obtained by the drawing system. We compare mental rates of design experiments with other tasks, and show how the drawing order is influenced by relations among figures.