COMMUNICATIVE AFFORDANCE OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN SKETCHING

چکیده مقاله

Design sketching, as a key designing technique and a rapid visual demonstration of design thinking, reasoning, and exploration, is being vastly utilized by industrial designers to communicate designers’ thoughts and ideas about a design situation. Despite the significance of communicative aspects of sketching to a wide range of creative design activities and in particular, to the product design processes, it has attracted less attention required. It is argued that one aspect of this ambiguity is related to the absence of human figures of the intended user(s) interacting with the product. Our observations suggest that sketches being generated by the vast majority of industrial design students in Iran are not communicative to the extent they should be in terms of the utilization of human elements in sketches. As a result, one of the main characteristics of sketching, i.e., the communicative aspect cannot be fulfilled. In this paper, the affordance of sketches is examined based on their communicative features with a particular focus on using human elements. The paper concludes by discussing educational factors influencing the communicative aspects of sketches and likely ways to fix the problem, enhancing the communicative qualities of sketches.