To design versus to understand design: The role of graphic representations and verbal expressions

While the primary objective of design education is essentially teaching how to design, the process of understanding a design product is another important and obvious goal of design education. Here, the aim is to find out how the capacity of the students to design relates to their capacity to understand and evaluate design. In a survey done in the freshman studio, students were asked to diagrammatic ally express the design ideas of the projects they were shown, to criticize the projects verbally and to grade them. Later, the diagrams produced by the students, their verbal evaluations of the projects, the grades they have assigned to these projects, and their own projects' jury grades are compared to find out the interaction among these variables. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.