The impact of architectural representations on conveying intent : A quantitative study

Abstract

Architects have to express themselves graphically in order to communicate ideas, both to clients they need to convince and to themselves. To do that, they appeal to a variety of representations supposedly faithfully carrying their initial intent. Research to date has demonstrated how “experts” designers and “non-expert” lay- people differently perceive, or on the other hand share, visual understanding ( Alcantara et al., 2005; Bates-Brkljac, 2007 ). It is yet unclear how architects themselves use different types of representations to express different intentions, and how their expected audience more or less successfully captures those intentions. The purpose of the present study is consequently to refine understanding of how differently a non-expert public captures the initial message of an architect, and what role representations do play in this understanding process. This study presents the results of a survey including roughly 700 lay-people’s responses to different forms of architectural representations, i.e. hand-drawings, CAD models and computer renderings. Results show that the computer representations are mostly perceived as conveying the same intents by the lay-people. Yet, renderings convey slightly more faithfully the intentions as intended by the architect than the CAD model. Our results suggest that low-end representations constitute the most efficient mean of architectural visual communication, being the best balance between success of conveyance of the architectural intent and time commitment. These findings can be used as guidelines to maximize the value of the feedback architects receive from the lay-people during the decision making process.