THE COMPARISON BETWEEN VISUAL THINKING USING COMPUTER AND CONVENTIONAL MEDIA IN THE CONCEPT GENERATION STAGES OF DESIGN

Computer, this new kind of media, has influenced the behavior of design to some degree. Among these years, many researches have appeared for the development of computer-aided design. In recent years, such kind of computer-aided studies about the forepart of design, that is the stage of concept generation, have also started to generate. But most of these researches belonged to the kind of applied studies with the test of computer systems. On the other hand, there were many researches about the visual thinking and cognitive behavior of designers while sketching or drawing in the stage of concept generation. From the synthesis of the fore two disciplines, we can find that there existing a point of deficiency, that is the cognitive research about designers using computers as the sketching media is absent. And that is what I want to study and discuss in this research. The fundamental analytic data of this research is the visual process chronicled form the sketching of subjects, and the assistant analytic data is the verbal data from the questions that the subjects are asked after his/her sketching. These data is analyzed by three coding schema. The cognitive appearance while designers generating concepts with computers or conventional media are propounded and discussed in this research.