DRAWING TECHNIQUES ON THE DESIGN CONCEPT PHASE: AN ANALYSIS OF BRAZILIAN, JAPANESE AND TURKISH STUDENTS’ STRATEGIES

DS 95: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE 2019), University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. 12th -13th September 2019

Year: 2019
Editor: Bohemia, Erik; Kovacevic, Ahmed; Buck, Lyndon; Brisco, Ross; Evans, Dorothy; Grierson, Hilary; Ion, William; Whitfield, Robert Ian
Author: Torrezzan, Cristina (1); van der Linden, Julio (1); Bohemia, Erik (2); Kaygan, Pınar (3); Bernardes, Mauricio (1)
Series: E&PDE
Institution: 1: Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; 2: Academy for Design Innovation Management, United Kingdom; 3: Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Section: Cultural 3
DOI number: https://doi.org/10.35199/epde2019.38
ISBN: 978-1-912254-05-7

Abstract

Professionals as product designers, architects and engineers have an intrinsic relationship with drawing, using it to think, imagine and represent everything from a creative outline of a proposal to its development, detailing, and presentation to the client and/or production. In this way, it becomes extremely relevant to choose and use techniques to communicate their designs with clarity and precision. In this sense, geometric drawing, technical drawing and sketch techniques are relevant part of design education. These ways of drawing, as different but related codes, allow designers and other stakeholders to communicate among themselves. Even existing standards (or styles, in the case of sketches) for these ways of drawings that are shared worldwide, cultural differences play a role as in any professional area, especially in the early phases of the design process. In this context, this article presents an analysis of drawings elaborated by product design students from different countries working on the Global Studio 2018, an international cross-institutional project. In this edition, undergraduate product design students of five universities from four countries (Brazil, Italy, Japan and Turkey) worked in sixteen paired teams, playing both “client” and “designer” roles. As clients they were asked to write a design brief and commission it to their paired team; as designers they have to provide design solutions to the brief. Based on documents sent from each team to its paired team, it was analyzed how they expressed their proposals through the drawings elaborated in the design concept phase. To support this study, six categories of analysis were used: a) Type of drawing (views or perspective); b) Material (computer, pencil, pen, use of colors); c) Differences and similarities in the drawings of the teams of each country and among members of the same team; d) Analysis of the layout; e) Presence of text (form of presentation and proportion in relation to the drawing); f) Communication of the drawing (if it was sufficient for the understanding of the proposal elaborated). Use of different techniques and different levels of expertise were observed both inter and intra teams. In some cases, students used drawings as mere illustrations for detailed textual descriptions of their design concepts. On the other hand, some students presented their design concepts by means of isometric drawings and front views as the main source of information using texts only as complementary information. Being a transversal and document-based study it is not possible to offer any explanation concerning students’ individual performances. Nevertheless, obtained results allowed identifying how product design students apply different ways of drawing for the same purpose. Future studies are necessary to understand cognitive aspects involved with these differences. As a practical contribution for product design, architecture and engineering education, knowing different strategies students adopt to elaborate drawings in the design concept phase is useful to the development of new educational practices aiming to improve their graphic expression skills.

Keywords: Drawing techniques, Design concept, Cross-cultural project, Global Studio

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