Research Information System
V STS ITALIA CONFERENCE: A Matter of Design. Making Society through Science and Technology, Milano, Italy, 12 - 14 June 2014, pp.261-281
In recent years, digital design tools have expanded the overall vision of design with uses such as digital manufacturing, modeling, animating, rendering, programming. Still, they are insufficient in assisting designers during the early phases of the design process. Conventional methods such as sketching and physical modeling are still the most effective and commonly used tools for conceptual design both in education and practice. It is mostly due to the challenges designers and tool developers face in attempts to digitally represent intuitive movements of the physical processes. Concerning that, this paper addresses the problems that are revealed while trying to translate the dynamic and intuitive features of the physical conceptual models to the digital platform. In order to identify the key features that are required to transfer to the digital media, both digital and physical model-making processes are explored through various experiments. The physical processes are investigated as dynamic representations where the modeled object is constantly evolving via instant and quick handmade models, namely, conceptual draft models. The potential advantages and deficiencies of current digital tools that are used for representing these models are analyzed through digital experiments. In consequence of the experiments, a general framework, which will lead to construct a methodology for the representation of conceptual draft models in digital medium, is proposed.
Keywords: Keywords: conceptual thinking, conceptual draft models, abstraction, physical modeling, digital modeling