A Quantitative Method to Compare the Impact of Design Media on the Architectural Ideation Process

Although we may know a lot about architectural design in terms of the inputs (e.g., early design decisions, programming, collaborative design) and outputs (e.g., project representations and building constructions), little is known about the actual design process itself. Currently, few studies have attempted to identify which cognitive functions are involved in the design process, how they operate, and to what extent they complement each other. From an extensive literature review, we have identified two cognitive functions, which are thought to underlie some of the complex activities involved in the design process, namely mental workload management and imagery. These two functions are quantitatively measured in the context of real design tasks using Bakan's task for workload management, and eye tracking for imagery. To our knowledge, this paper presents the first attempt to address the complex design process in a quantitative and online manner. Preliminary results are reported testing the impact of three design media, namely: physical modeling, hand drawings, and CAD software. An interpretation of fractal structures is also given and proposed to account for the impact of different media on mental imagery. 1. Research Objectives The research aims to propose, develop and validate a quantitative method for assessing the impact of medium – both analog and digital – on the design process, specifically during the phase of ideation, which we define as the internal and external representation, and back and forth formulation of the earliest design ideas. This assessment stems from the observation that whatever medium, system P. COTE, A. MOHAMED-AHMED and S. TREMBLAY 540 or technology is used to "assist" the design process, it comes with a cost in terms of a reduction in creative possibilities. Any medium limits the process of ideation in one way or another whether it is the learning curve required to master the technique or the interface (e.g., drawing, modeling software, etc.), the time necessary to obtain the result (the artifact), or the characteristics and properties that are required for the medium used (e.g., specific user skills). Thus, there is always a tradeoff for the designer in choosing a medium to reach a goal, from the idea to the artifact (or its representation), from the intangible to the tangible idea. The question then is which medium is the most effective for the process of ideation and which incurs the least cognitive cost ? We propose a measure to evaluate this quantitatively. The originality of the research stems from its proposed method. Previous comparisons of design media have essentially been qualitative in nature, often relying on subject verbalization for data acquisition, all depending at one point or the other upon the subjective interpretations of the experimenter, the participant, or both. However, verbal reports have been shown to be quite limitative in knowledge acquisition by many authors, namely Ericsson and Simon [1]. The proposed quantitative method eliminates this bias by using an objective measure of the impact of each medium on the designer’s cognitive processes [1].