Do Design Sketches Tell Us How Designers' Ideas Are Related? A Comparison of Functional Similarity Assessment and Designer Concept Mapping

Abstract As design evolves, there is great interest in using new design tools to evaluate and interpret design artifacts such as sketches. This study explores whether or not assessing sketches for functional similarity is an effective way of understanding how designers' ideas are related to one another. This work studies the influence of digital tablets for sketching on concept evolution patterns and investigates whether sketches made on tablets provide a more accurate picture of how designers' ideas are related than sketches made on paper. We explore differences between designers' understanding of how their ideas are related and the way that interrelatedness is represented in their sketches as standalone artifacts. We also ask if there are any differences in designers and design reviewers' assessments of concept evolution patterns between tablet and paper sketching. We find that designers' and design reviewers' assessments of idea interrelatedness did not match, which implies that looking at sketches alone is not enough for understanding a designer's ideation process. Rather, there needs to be communication between the designer and the observer to understand the full extent of relations between concepts. We also find no difference between sketching tools in the level of agreement between designers' assessments of their ideas and design reviewers’ assessment of sketches. All in all, these results point to the idea that assessing functional similarity alone may not be enough to claim full understanding of the relationship between a series of concepts.