Visualising the design process with dynamic graph

Abstract

Design Process is a continuous decision-making movement. Yet, the designer usually executes the process in a jumping way, from state to the other. Nevertheless, this kind of jumping process would cause loss of some essential information, such as a glance of design, or certain process of shape evolvement which designers want to know. Those unrecorded and therefore missing statistics information are very important to the research of design thinking and process. This study employs an animation and comic as research objects. In addition to utilising the methods of thinking aloud and protocol analysis, as well as recording the progress of this experiment, the information is digitalised. By using computer to develop a webpage-interface visualisation cloud system, called Dynamic Graph System which records and collects the evolving data generated from the space design process and stores this information into the cloud database. The system, then, uses the State space as a base, and utilises the derivative Dynamic Graph of spatial style which is evolved from the collected data of the Design Process. By studying and analysing the dynamic graphs, to investigate whether we can acquire more information of design process by using information visualisation approach to record of the evolution of the design process and helped the designers or not. This study intends to explore whether Dynamic Graph System helps and assists the designer to be more efficient in completing his/her work from the interaction between Dynamic Graph System and the designer. © 2012, Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.