Abstract
Experiencing physical and digital configurations of objects is an essential part of design education and practice. This exploratory work investigates whether designers develop a particular way of seeing through training. In particular, it examines the extent to which college education gives designers a specific way of seeing a three-dimensional object. In this study we recruited design students from Pratt Institute, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Dept. of Art & Design (D.A.D./PUC-Rio) and compared freshman (F) and senior (S) design students’ patterns of free visual exploration while looking at a rectilinear volume composition, designed according to visual relationships proposed by Rowena Kostellow (Hannah, 2002). To measure the number and duration of fixations, the study considered four areas of interest: the external area (i.e., the “negative spaces” around the volume), the dominant form area, the subdominant form area, and the subordinate form area, i.e., the three forms joined in the object composition. Heat maps of visual inspection, total fixation durations, and visit counts were analyzed (ANOVA), and have shown a dispersion pattern between freshman and senior students and reveal a broad number of fixation points in the negative area. The number (visit count) and duration of fixations varied according to view angles. This work’s results pave the way to the hypotheses in which the influence of expertise is decisive to eye movements (Gegenfurtner, Lehtinen, & Säljö, 2011) and in which a tacit design thinking flourish to support project decisions and system thinking.
Presenters
Claudio MagalhãesAssociate Professor, Department of Art & Design , Pontifical Catholic University of io de Janeiro / PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Leslie Welch
Associate Professor, CLPS / Brown University
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Design Thinking, Design Foundation, Visual Learning
