University students often struggle with choosing a topic for their final projects due to the lack of a supporting and defining framework for said selection. Should the student be oriented toward reflecting on how each of the possible topics to choose from can become an impactful project in the short, mid and long run, maybe that selection becomes…

An ever-increasing array of design visualisation tools are available to designers. As such, design education is constantly challenged to keep up with these trends so that students are best equipped for entering industrial practice. This paper reports a study into the use of digital sketching, a relatively new digital visualisation tool. The study…

With the projects implemented in the 'Design for the Disabled' course in Gazi University 2019- 2020 academic year, fourteen students are asked to develop solutions for the problems of disabled individuals, which is one of the real-world issues, while gaining professional knowledge such as critical thinking, idea generation and learning the…

Spatial ability is one of the most important key points for technical professions such as architects and engineers and is directly related with the success in educational and professional business life. In this regard, "Techniques of Architectural Presentation", a first semester architectural department course at Gebze Technical…

This paper set out to investigate "how design students learn from visualising theory in design education." The exploration rests on the assumption that the application of tools and techniques from design practice supports design students with an entrance to the theoretical part of the field. The paper is based on teaching experiences…

This paper presents the findings of visual analyses conducted on 369 sketch ideas generated in three 6-3-5 visual brainstorming sessions by a total of 25 participants, following the same design brief. The motivation for the study was an interest in the thematic content of the ideas generated as groups, and the individual representation styles used…

In design studio, sketching or visual thinking is part of processes that assist students to achieve final design solutions. At Queensland University of Technology's (QUT's) First and Third Year industrial design studio classes we engage in a variety of teaching pedagogies from which we identify "Concept Bombs" as instrumental in the…

In this paper, we present an exploratory protocol study on the use of different communication channels during design sketching. We focus on how individual designers share their mental models with other designers in a group, and analyse their use of graphical, textual, and verbal communications during concept generation. Our findings suggest that…

This paper starts from the premise that drawing can be a means of visualising thinking, with an emphasis on the process involved. A gap often seems to exist in the minds of students of visual/material creative fields in ideas-generative contexts, between thought and action. The thesis is that the gap between thinking and doing can be reduced to…