The impact of architectural representations on conveying design intent.

Architects express themselves graphically in order to communicate ideas both to clients and to themselves. In practice, they rely on a variety of representations such as free-hand drawings, 3D computer rendered images, and photomontages to convey their design intent. Research to date has demonstrated differences and commonalities in the ways in which expert designers and laymen perceive visual understanding. It is still unclear how architects themselves use different types of representations to express different intentions, and how accurately their expected audience perceives those intentions. The purpose of this research is to investigate how laymen interpret the initial design intent of an architect’s design, and what role different forms of representations play in this process of understanding a design. This paper describes a five-step process for developing a survey that was used to gather data from 686 laymen respondents. It was found that certain types of simpler representations presented in specific contexts are unexpectedly found to be a more efficient way to faithfully transmit an architectural intent.