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concentrated on the later stages of design, as a graphic medium for drawing, modeling .... conducted in two separated settings: a traditional design studio and a CAAD lab. ... Furthermore, the user has the opportunity to switch to a 3D view to ...
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A Comparing Study of the influence of CAAD Tools to Conceptual Architecture Design Phase By Yi Zhu, Tomás Dorta and Giovanni De Paoli Faculty of Environmental design, University of Montreal

Abstract: The research presented here intends to achieve a better understanding of the influence of the CAAD tools on the contemporary conceptual architectural design process. The overall research methodology composes of two parts: an interview study with experienced architects and a controlled design study carried out with two groups of senior college architecture-majored students. The research of the first study is set to find out the answers of what the architects’ needs are during the conceptual design phase and how current commercially available tools address their needs; the second study is to find out how the tools influence designers’ design quality so as to further justify the result obtained from the first part. The final results demonstrate that the creation procedure has not been influenced by the adoption of CAAD tools and that current widely adapted CAAD tools still have no significant advantage over traditional design tools in the conceptual design phase. Key words: CAAD, Architecture, Conceptual, Design

1. Background The conceptual phase of design is one of the most critical parts in the design phases because it is the foundation for the development of design ideas. Most original ideas emerge in this phase, and these ideas continue to develop or are revised throughout the rest of the design process. It plays a significant role in the whole project. A promising solution during the conceptual phase means a lot to the cost of the building’s life span. During the conceptual phase of design, freehand sketching has traditionally been used widely for design ideation and regarded as an essential design conceptual tool (Schon, 1983; Goel, 1995; Suwa and Tversky, 1997; Cross, 1999; Tversky, 1999; Kavakli, et al, 1999 and Bilda and Demirkan, 2003). It was referred to by Schon as a process of reflection-in-action (Schon, 1983). He suggested that through drawing designers created a ‘virtual world’, where the drawing disclosed qualities and relations unimagined beforehand. Sketches are representations which will often allow the designer to ‘try out’ a new idea on paper, quickly and cheaply. The ‘seeing as’ and ‘seeing that’ notions were presented by Goldschmidt (Goldschmidt, 1991; Schon and Wiggins, 1992; Goel, 1995). Also sketches were studied in order to find out how they can be a good medium for conversation. Other studies of design protocols managed to disclose insights into varied aspects of the design behaviors (Kavakli, et al., 1999; 29

A Comparing Study of the influence of CAAD Tools to Conceptual Architecture Design Phase

Suwa, 2000). Dorta has demonstrated that no significant performance difference was observed between traditional and VR media in his experiment (Dorta, 1998). Architects have different preferences upon the tools, media and methods they utilize in the designing during the architectural conceptual phase of design. Some would rather “play” with physical 3D models; others give their preference to computergenerated forms. Nevertheless, the majority of the architects in the professional community still stick to the traditional method of beginning with a simple freehand sketch. There are certain disadvantages with the traditional methods, such as the difficulty in communicating ideas with other specialists and in proceeding to the following procedure with computer. More importantly, when facing a tremendous number of choices, the conceptual phase in the traditional manner relies greatly on the designer’s intuition, which causes a problem in design education. Therefore, by using an applicable software package that could better reflect the mental activity of the designer, one can not only find a computational way of assisting the designer but also better understand and control the design process, which would benefit the design and would ultimately improve the quality of design. Pioneer study has produced the conclusion that digital visual representations can be utilized to achieve better understanding of the form because, comparing to the traditional freehand tools, the intensive visualization and immediate feedback in computer media assist the designer in generating imaging of his/her ideation (Marx, 2000). Nevertheless, other studies also discovered that though VR has a significant influence on the activities of communicating 3D information in the design process, it still has no significant edge in improving the design performance of the designers over traditional tools (Dorta, 2002). There is no doubt that the computer has become an essential tool in the building design process with the popular utilization of CAAD. In spite of the advanced features that have been designed for the CAAD tools, most of their utilization is mainly concentrated on the later stages of design, as a graphic medium for drawing, modeling, rendering and simulation. The way architects explore ideas in the conceptual phase of design has remained consistent. Pen, pencil and paper, instead of software tools, are serviced to rotate the ideas. CAAD tools are viewed as production tools rather than as another design tool. It seems that there are certain bottlenecks within most of the CAAD tools that prevent designers from employing computer in the conceptual stage of the decision working, because the natural flow of the designing is conflictive with this kind of tools. Question then arises upon what an efficient software package regarding the early design stage should be like. Nevertheless, in order to seek for the definition of a tool that could be a better aid to the architects in the design process, a better understanding of how architects’ design activities is affected by the current available CAAD tools during the conceptual design phase becomes essential. The previous research shows that there are several basic levels of design behaviors. For instance, it was demonstrated that there were four critical levels in the deign behaviors, which are physical, perceptual, functional and conceptual (Suwa et al., 1998). Other researches also offered certain level of descriptions upon the design behaviors of the professional architects (Bilda et al 2006). Nevertheless, few researches could be found about how the available software

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package had achieved in addressing these design activities and in what level they could help the architects improve their design quality. This research presented here focuses on “design quality” in general and on whether it improves or deteriorates with the utilization of different tools, rather than on testing the designers’ cognitive patterns. In this study, the main interest is not in the design process but in the design outcomes, namely, the qualitative aspects of the resulting conceptual design produced by the designers. By saying “design quality”, we mainly include creativity and adaptability of the finished design. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that the initial motivation of this study was based on a search for effective CAAD tools in the conceptual design and that the implications of the study pose questions on how to develop CAAD tools suitable for the conceptual design.

2. Methodology An interview study of experienced architects may provide us a better and insightful understanding of the design behaviors, thus offering a better knowledge base for the exploration of a better model of the CAAD tools’ involvement with architectural design. Nonetheless, while the interview study with the experts was a study without large sample groups due to the difficulty of gaining access to a large number of experienced architects, it is hard to justify the result obtained from this type of studies as the sample tends to be fairly small. Therefore, it would be a preferable strategy to carry out a parallel study with a larger number of samples, which could provide more data for justifying or supporting the result obtained from the former research. As the novice designers are the most accessible groups for the interview studies (Cross and Cross, 1998), it would be a preferable strategy to carry out the parallel study within a group of students, thus providing a further and optimized result of the research. Therefore, the overall research methodology would be composed of two parts: an interview study with experienced architects and a design observation study carried out in two groups of college senior architecture-majored students. This research is intended to find out the influence of CAAD tools on the design performance of contemporary architects in the phase of conceptual design. To be more precise, the interview study is set to find out the answers to what the architects’ needs are during the conceptual design phase and how the current commercially available tools address their needs while the controlled experience study is to further disclose how the tools influence the designers’ design quality so as to further justify the result obtained from the first step.

3. Experienced Architect (Interview) Looking into the research methodologies of the design process/design behaviors studies, there are many ways that have been developed, namely, interviews, observations, case studies, protocol studies, simulation trials, reflections and theorizing (Cross 1992). Interview studies have usually been conducted with the experienced designers. It maximizes the opportunity for the researcher to access the experienced architects’ knowledge and understanding of the design issue (Cross 1992).

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Six seasoned architects from six Canadian architect’s offices and four seasoned architects from four Chinese architect’s offices were invited to take part in the interview study. The sizes of the six Canadian firms the interviewed architects coming from are: A1: 60 Architects, 50 drafts persons A2: 32 Architects, 17 drafts persons A3: 33 Architects, 10 drafts persons. A4: 12 Architects, 1 drafts person. A5: 13 Architects A6: 4 Architects The sizes of the four Chinese firms the interviewed architects coming from are: B1: 10 Architects, 5 drafts persons B2: 23 Architects, 5 drafts persons B3: 115 Architects B4: 23 Architects The interviewees were asked to hold a brief interview meeting with the researcher. The form of the interview process was more of a free talk rather than a structured question-by-question interview. The interviewer had the interview questionnaire, which was not revealed to the interviewees before the meeting. The main reason for applying this strategy was something that had been noticed from the previous experiences. On the one hand, the interviewees tend to have a negative attitude towards answering a questionnaire with more than 20 questions, which might cost them more than 25 minutes. Therefore, once being proposed to have a meeting for going through a questionnaire, they were most likely to take the reaction of rejecting it. Nevertheless, on the other hand, they seemed to show much more tolerance for a face-to-face interview under a relaxed atmosphere, which might actually takes an even longer (sometime up to 45 to 60 minutes) period. To make an efficient utilization of the interview time, though it seemed to be a free chat, the interviewer set the tune and maintained the direction of the communication with the questionnaire prepared beforehand.

3.1 interview Results All the 10 firms have adapted CAAD tools in their practice, and AutoCAD (including the architect’s desktop developed above the AutoCAD platform by AutoDesk) has become the most popular tools utilized by them. The transfer period from hand drawings to CAAD took place in the 1980s and 1990s (from early 1980s A1, B3 to mid 1990s A5, B1). The other software packages widely utilized includes formZ, 3D max and Lightscape. Nevertheless, the study shows that CAAD tools have not been integrated into the creation procedure of conceptual architectural design and the influence of the CAAD tools in the conceptual design phase is still very minor. All the ten interviewees agreed that their creation procedure has not been influenced by the adoption of the digital tools. The reason could be disclosed by many comments from the interviewees. Creation is a mental issue that does not require the involvement of any CAAD tools (Interview with architects from A1), or creation procedure has not been revised by the 32

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involvement of CAAD tools (Interview with architects from A2). The most important and widely-adapted tools utilized in the architectural design phase are still pencil and freehand drawings, as it is also found in other studies that sketches have been taken as the professional traditional tools that offered a means with which the designer clarifies the characteristics of the design, communicates the design, negotiates their design process, stores ideas and reveals the mechanics of their thinking process at the early stage and has associations with hidden meanings in his or her imagination which most likely will not be fully or easily understood by others. (Purcell and Gero, 1998; Atman et al. 1999; Dorner, 1999; Lipson and Shpitalni, 2000). An important characteristics of the traditional sketch tools compared to the computer tools currently available is the fact that it is the ability to accommodate brevity, which could be further proved by the following facts. While the interviewees were asked to identify the bottleneck/setback brought to the architecture conceptual design by the adaptation of computer tools, the most serious complaint from them was that a blurring/vague way of thinking was not tolerated by the currently highly popular CAAD tools available from the market (Interview with architects from A2, A4, A5, B1, B2, and B4). Current software packages tend to demand a very precise input of information before they can carry on the task to the next step. Nevertheless, most of the time during the early design phase, as having been disclosed in the earlier paragraphs, the ideas generated by the architect contain certain levels of uncertainty and vague impressions, which can hardly be precisely and quantitatively described. Regarding the influence of CAAD tools on the design collaboration and organization, the result collected varied a lot. Certain firms mentioned that their collaboration and organization have never been revised by the introduction of computer tools (Interview with architects from A1, A3,A6 and B2), while certain other interviewees mentioned that the adaptation of CAAD tools seems to reduce the active communication and ideal sharing during the design procedure. The architects are more concentrated on his own screen, instead of sharing the ideas and taking a look at each other’s work once a while, which , to some extent, influenced the qualities of design (Interview with architects from A2,A4 and B3, B5). Nevertheless, the comments collected upon this issue varied a lot, which implies that whether the adaptation of CAAD tools does influence the design collaboration and organization largely depends on the firm’s original design collaboration and organization patterns. It was further disclosed that with the utilization of CAAD tools, the architects tend to ignore the global view of the whole design development process: They tend to emphasize upon their own “piece of pie”. This issue has been brought up by several interviewees (Interview with architects from A2, A3, A5, B2 and B4). Being able to maintain a global view plays a critical role in the conceptual design phase, and this problem should be considered as a serious setback upon the integration of CAAD tools in the conceptual architectural design phase. Comparing to the traditional ways of freehand drawing, the CAAD tools hold the immediacy of the transformation of idea (Interviews with architects from A2, A4, B3 and B4), which implies that freehand drawing is a more efficient medium to directly transform ideas into paper illustration than the current CAD. This problem could be partially caused by the complexity of interface, which does require certain rules to follow so as to cope with it. Another factor that might potentially reduce the qualities

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of deign derives from the public impression of CAAD tools. While the time for the creative design procedure could not be really reduced, the customer are expecting less time for this procedure and hope to obtain the result earlier because they feel the computer involvement would enable the architects to do the (creative) job faster. This phenomenon directly lead to the fact that the time left for the creative procedure is actually shortened, which would, eventually, deteriorate the quality of the conceptual design (Interviews with A2, A3, A5, B2 and B4). The major problems of currently deployed CAAD tools presented by the interviewees could be summarized in the following table: The Problems of currently deployed CAAD tools By the adaptation of current CAAD tools, architects tend to ignore the global 1 view of the whole design development process during their work. The blurring/vague way of design thinking is not tolerated by the currently 2 CAAD tools. With the utilization of the current CAAD tools, the architects are more 3

concentrated on their own screen, instead of communicating with each other once a while during the working process.

4

The CAAD tools hold the immediacy of the transformation of idea.

Table1. The Most critical problems that existed in the currently available CAAD tools (As mentioned by the interviewees)

4. Study with Novice Designers This part of study was carried out with two sets of students, who have not obtained much design experience and formed their own stable behavior habits in the design. The two sets of students are from two universities. Both of the two experiments were conducted in two separated settings: a traditional design studio and a CAAD lab. The subject Group A consisted of 14 senior undergraduates from the department of architecture at W University and Group B 10 students from the department of architecture of H University. The students were voluntary participants, and the members of each group had acquired the same amount of knowledge and experience in CAAD before the experiment. The students from Group A had completed two undergraduate CAAD courses in their junior and sophomore years and the student from Group B have completed three CAAD courses in their junior and sophomore years. Students from Groups A and B were further divided into two sub-groups. In Group A, two subgroups with 7 students in each group were formed, and in Group B each sub-group was made up of 5 students. One of the subgroups from each Group were required to finish the project with CAAD tools in a CAAD lab, while the rest were required to finish the project with traditional freehand tools. 34

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2 1

5

7

AutoCad

T SCad

3dMax

Sketchup

Figure 1 Tools Utilized by the Students The students who were required to finish this assignment with computer were free to select the software packages that they deemed most suitable for this project. Other than the main stream CAAD software packages such as AutoCAD, 3dMax and SketchUp, the CAAD tool that attracted most users is TScad (http://www.tangent.com.cn/), which is a simple commercial architectural CAAD tool, developed especially for architectural tasks above the AutoCAD platform with a Chinese interface. While using the software, instead of lines and shapes, the designer works with space elements such as wall, window, door and column. The user could also benefit from a large object library from which the designer could choose the items to fit into his/her design. Furthermore, the user has the opportunity to switch to a 3D view to examine the changes interactively in the environment. Since there are several students who selected more than one tool in their work, the total statistical number (15) in the survey question “tools utilized by students” is larger than the actual sum of the students’ number in the CAAD sub-groups of both Group A and B (12). This study aims at gaining an insight into identifying the difference in novice designers’ design quality while doing the conceptual design with digital or traditional media. Design results have been collected from the design process of two sets of participants solving two conceptual architectural design problems, namely a design of facade for a single family house and a restaurant design. For each assignment, the students involved were divided into two groups, one of which was required to finish the assignment in the traditional method while the other was required to do it with CAAD tools. Both groups were given 8 hrs to finish their assignments and were asked to record their progress in each step by saving either a copy of their evolving sketch drawings or digital files. This information, which severed as a very good reminder, is fairly important as in the later interviews with the students after the experiment. The analyses of the interview data collected allow a comparative study that demonstrated the influence of the use of different media upon the novice designers in the conceptual design phase. Later on, their works were evaluated by a jury made up of professors from the department of architecture from M University. In order to eliminate the possible information that is caused by the design presentation media to the jury which could be misleading, all the design results were transformed to digital tools and were presented

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to the jury for evaluation purpose. By applying this strategy, the jury’s critics would focus on the quality of design itself rather than on the difference caused by varied presentation methods.

4.1 Result of Group A (design of a ocean front club) The assignment for group A was an ocean front club. The evaluation is presented in a two-dimensional way, which means that there are two types of criteria made to each project, which are the levels of complexity and adaptation. The level of complexity demonstrated the geometric elements that were involved in the creation of the project, which, nevertheless, was not directly related to the quality of the finished design project. The other evaluation standard, adaptation, identified the level of feasibility of the project to the potential user and environment, which includes creativity, aesthetics, commercial and ergonomic aspects of the design, all of which did influence and was immediately connected to the quality of the design. As what we are mostly interested in and carefully observing is “the quality of the design”, the evaluation of the adaptation of the design turns out to be more critical to our main purpose, while the evaluation on the level of complexity may benefit us by providing further information on the finished project. The level of adaptation of each project is graded in a range between 0 and 25. Similarly, the level of complexity of each project is graded in the range of 0-30. A better project in terms of adaptation will receive a higher grade in the criteria of adaptation. As well, a more complex project in will receive a higher grade in the criteria of complexity. 30 1 5

25

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14 10

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20 15 4 10

6 11 8

2 9

5 13 0 0

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10 15 Adaptation

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□Designers Using Traditional Tools

Figure 2 Result of Group A The result of the project could be demonstrated by the diagram above (figure 2). It clearly demonstrated that there is not a clear gap between the qualities of the finished projects of the groups utilizing the traditional design tools and the group utilized CAAD tools. The average score of the level of adaptation is 11.43 for the freehand group and

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11.78 for the CAAD group. The inconsistency between the two groups is less than 3% (2.97%). The result analysis of the level of complexity was also in accordance with the result of the level of adaptation. The average score of the level of complexity is 16.36 for the freehand group and 16.21 for the CAAD group, which presented a variation of less than 1%. In other words, the jury was not able to identify a clear difference of design quality between the finished projects by traditional tools and CAAD tools.

4.2 Result of Group B (design of facade of a farmer’s house) A different project was assigned to Group B, which was a design of facade of a farmer’s house. The completed projects were evaluated in an alternative way. Jury numbers directly ranked the ten finished projects in terms of design quality. As there were certain projects that were finished with a similar design quality and, thus, share the same ranking, there were overall 6 rankings assigned to the ten finished projects, in which 1 was considered to be the project finished with the best design quality and 6 the most poorly finished project. The final result, which could be observed from the following diagram (Figure 3), clearly demonstrated the fact that the design qualities of the projects finished by either freehand or CAAD tools were very similar. The average ranking of projects finished with freehand was 3.75, and the average ranking of projects finished with CAAD tools was 3.83, which demonstrated a variation of less than 3% (2.1%), and which meant that a clear difference of design quality between the finished projects by traditional tools and by CAAD tools could not be identified either . 7

Rankings

6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0

2

4

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Designers Freehand

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Figure 3 Result of Group B

5. Novice Designers Interview Result The result of the quality of the finished project demonstrated that there was no significant difference in the design quality between the conceptual design projects finished with traditional freehand and with CAAD tools. To achieve a further

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understanding of the result, an interview was carried out later among the students involved in the experiment. The questions and the answers were presented as below. 4 17%

20 83% CAAD tools

Freehand

Figure 4 Interviewees’ Preference on CAAD or Freehand Tools in the Creative Design 7 29%

17 71%

CAAD tools

Freehand

Figure 5 Interviewees’ Preference of Tools on CAAD or Freehand Tools in the Procedure of Design Revision The first question was to find out these novice designers’ preference of the tools they would use during the conceptual design phase. The response provided a rather clear answer to this issue. Most of the interviewees (83%) would prefer traditional way of utilizing freehand tools in the creative design process (Figure 4). Nevertheless, the interview provided a positive response towards the adaptation of CAAD tools in the revision procedure of design. “Revision procedure” refers to the design procedure that immediately follows the phase of creative design—the designer revises and optimizes the idea generated in the last step. A majority of the interviewees (71%) showed a preference of using CAAD tools in the revision procedure (Figure 5).

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19 16

8

Focus and guide the creative thinking

Make immediate presentation drawings

Allow the ambiguity expression for the idea exchanges between colleagues

Figure 6 Bottlenecks existed in the current CAAD tools As for the reason why the CAAD tools were less popular than the traditional freehand way in the creative design process, the interviewees’ responses could be summarized by the diagram above (Figure 6). Utilizing the current CAAD tools to do conceptual design work, the interviewees have difficulty mostly in focusing and guiding the creative thinking, as mentioned by 8 interviewees, in making immediate presentation drawings, as mentioned by 19 interviewees, and in allowing the ambiguous expression for the idea exchanges between colleagues, as mentioned by 16 interviewees. These requirements could also be regarded as the key issues that were in need of improvement in the currently available CAAD tools. 17%

83%

Yes

No

Figure 7 Interviewees’ preferences upon whether current CAAD tools’ interface interfere design Creative thinking Furthermore, the majority of the interviewees hold a negative view towards the interface of currently available CAAD tools. 83% of the interviewees hold the view that the interface does interfere with the design creative thinking (Figure 7). Even though there were several students that have selected multiple CAAD tools to finish the task, most of the interviewees (about 79%) feel that there is a loss of information during the transferring of different tools, which reasonably leads to the 39

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fact that the majority of the interviewees (about 62%) prefer to select a single tool rather than a combination of tools to handle different types of design assignments (Figures 8,9).

Multiple 38% Single 62%

Single

Multiple

Figure 8 interviewees’ preference of utilizing single or multiple design tools for varied tasks

No 21%

Yes 79% No

Yes

Figure 9 interviewees’ view of whether there is a loss of information between the transferring of tools

6. Conclusion The initial conclusions of the analysis of the interview were that the existing CAAD tools are not suitable for a conceptual design phase because the existing CAAD tools have not yet developed an appropriate way to accommodate the conceptual design thinking and that the feelings of the tools still can not match those of an original pencil and paper. The result obtained from both studies with experienced architect and architectural students supported this point in varied ways. 1. All the ten interviewed experienced architects demonstrated that their creation procedure has not been influenced by the adoption of the digital tools, which, in other words, meant that they still used the traditional tools as their primary tool in the design creation phase because it is a more convenient and powerful tool in their conceptual design phase.

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2. In the controlled design study carried out with the two groups of Architecture College students, the average scores achieved by the students utilizing digital tools are very similar to those of their counterparts utilizing traditional tools, which implied that the design quality of the group using CAAD tools has no edge over the group adapting traditional tools. 3. The interviews with novice designers after the design work demonstrated that they prefer to utilize traditional tools in the creativity phase of design as it was regarded as a more powerful tool. There are several reasons that have led to these consequences as summarized as the following: First of all, architecture is always considered to be a complex and contradictory issue. It involves the richness and ambiguity of modern experience as well as the vagueness of human experience. Therefore, especially during the conceptual design stage, it is necessary for the designers to understand and accept these ambiguities. It subsequently and logically brings up the requirement for the tools they utilize in this activity, which is to allow the ambiguous expression of their idea. However, currently available CAAD tools fall short on this aspect, which significantly has prevented their adaptation in the ideation stage of design. It has been mentioned by both the novice and the experienced designers from the interview. Secondly, the majority of the interviewees prefer to use a single tool rather than a combination of tools to handle different types of design assignments because there may be a loss of information during the transferring of different tools. The traditional tools, including the pencil and paper, do meet this requirement as a multiple-task tool. However, most of the currently available CAAD tools are more focused upon a single task. Different tools were specially designed to cope with varied types of tasks. Unlike the traditional tools that could be regarded as multifunctional tool that could fulfill the demands of almost any type of jobs, today’s CAAD tools tend to be designed specially for a particular type of jobs in the design. Therefore, a more comprehensive package that would combine different tasks could significantly improve the usability of CAAD tools in the conceptual design phase. Finally, the interfaces of the currently available CAAD tools are also preventing the designers from focusing and concentrating on the creative thinking. The interviewed experienced architects brought up their concerning regarding the following two issues. 1. Currently available CAAD tools hold the immediacy of the transformation of idea and 2. Architects are more concentrated in their own screen with the utilization of the current CAAD tools instead of communicating with the colleagues frequently during the working process. Both of the two problems were related to the interface and the way how human interact with the current CAAD tools. Furthermore, the result of the questionnaire for the architectural students evidently demonstrated that the interface interfere with the design thinking. This fact clearly showed that a better interface that could better accommodate the working pattern of the architects would largely improve the integration of the CAAD tools into the creation phase of architecture design. As early design is a complex activity and computers have potential in providing assistance, the digital age will change the design world even more dramatically than it has done. The advantage that leads to the utilization of computers in the design process is to improve the process and the result of design. By saying “the process and

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the result of design” we are talking about not only the improvement of the quantities (or “efficiency”) of design, but also, especially in the conceptual design phase, the qualities of design. Computers do so by allowing us to use our architectural knowledge and experience in a better way. Therefore, certain realities of how we do the design work should be acknowledged and respected. In other words, in order to better integrate the computer tools into the conceptual design process, the CAAD tools must be able to include more functions and features that are involved in the conceptual design process. In this research certain significant reasons that prevent the involvement of CAAD tools in the design process has been disclosed. By closing up these gaps, the design environment offered by the CAAD tools will be more communicative, interactive and integrated, and they can have a better chance to play a more important role in the conceptual architectural design phase and improve the design quality. Follow-up research should be devoted to further clarifying these demands and to how to implement the CAAD tools to meet these demands so as to develop CAAD tools that are suitable for the conceptual design.

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Kavakli, M., M. Suwa, J. Gero and T. Purcell. 1999. Sketching interpretation in novice and expert designers. In Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design, edited by J.S. Gero and B. Tversky. Sydney: Key Center of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney. Lipson, H., and M. Shpitalni. 2000, Conceptual design and analysis by sketching. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing 14 (5) Marx, J. 2000. A proposal for alternative methods for teaching digital design. Automation in Construction 9. Purcell, A. T. and J. S. Gero. 1998, Drawings and the design process. Design Studies 19 (4) Schon, D. 1983. The reflective practitioner. London: Temple-Smith. Schon, D., and G. Wiggins. 1992. Kinds of seeing and their function in designing. Design Studies 13(2) Suwa, M. and B. Tversky. 1997. What do architects and students perceive in their design sketches: A protocol analysis. Design Studies 18 (4). Suwa M., T. Purcell and J.S. Gero. 1998. Macroscopic analysis of design processes based on a scheme for coding designers’ cognitive actions. Design Studies 19 (4). Suwa, M., J. Gero and T. Purcell. 2000. Unexpected discoveries and S-invention of design requirements: important vehicles for a design process. Design Studies 21 (6). Tversky, B. 1999. What does drawing reveal about thinking. In Visual and spatial reasoning in design, edited by J.S. Gero and B. Tversky. Australia: University of Sydney.

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