Sketching During Mechanical Design: Studying Sketching At The University Of Maryland

The ability to create hand-drawn sketches is still a relevant skill for design engineering. [1] The idea that thoughts and cognitive processes can be captured by pencil and paper is the basic essence of sketching. Engineers and architects alike have long been used sketching as a tool for documenting mental processes, organizing ideas, creating plans, and presenting their ideas to others via a comfortable medium. The authors present a sampling of literature to remind all that sketching helps the designer work through his or her own cognitive processes in a selfdocumenting fashion. This paper reports on the sketching habits of capstone design students at The University of Maryland, College Park in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Student sketching skills were assessed using skill-based coding schemes and a content-based coding scheme. A sketching importance lesson was given to students of one capstone design course section and results in their sketching of project concepts were analyzed and compare to a control group made up of another section. The sketching importance lesson focused on the value of sketching for design not on how to sketch. A significant finding was that the sketching importance lesson changed the type of sketches produced; the number of sketches produced by the students (a reduction), and increased the number of details within sketches.