Roles of Referring-Sketching Action for the Design Ideation

Abstract

The study mainly explored the behavioural flow and the linkage relationship between the searched content and the transformed ideas in designers` ideation process through the methods of in-situ observation of four practicing graphic designers. This paper proposes a two-stage S-R behavioural flow within a designer`s ideation process. And the main findings show that first, designers tend to generate more different directions of ideas in the "S-R for WI" stage period and combine different ideas or combine them with their imagination in the "S-R for CNS" stage period. Second, the visual stimuli with more concrete features that designers found was utilized to combine with others to form a complete idea while the visual stimuli with more abstract features seem to be combined with the designer`s imagination to form some ideas that differed from the previous ideas. Moreover, the study should be regarded as a pilot study for proposing an analytic method to the related research in the design field and other possible methods should be utilized to in the future for interpreting the deep linkage between the content they searched for and the ideas they generated.