Learning design sketching from animations and storyboards

A digital pen-and-paper system that generates stroke-by-stroke animations was used to compare the perception of interactive animations versus printed storyboards. Design students studied a space-planning example as either an animation or a storyboard and then emulated the example in doing a similar problem. Students viewing the animations rather than the storyboards performed marginally better in terms of matching the example steps and meeting design quality criteria. Students may understand the process of design sketching, but may lack the skills to copy the steps. Emulating the solution requires both cognitive skills and graphic facility. While beginners could logically organize spatial adjacencies, they often radically resized required program areas to streamline geometry. After organizing building spaces, they lacked the graphic conventions to articulate architectural features, so they could not copy refinement steps. Subjects at all levels used approximately the same number of strokes, with more productive sketching from advanced subjects.