Measuring Information Content of Freehand Sketches Using a Cognitive Chunk Visualization Protocol

Abstract

This paper first presents a protocol study and its software realization for visualizing cognitive chunks as they form in real time during freehand sketching of design concepts, and then illustrates a method and metrics for measuring the information content of freehand sketches based on those chunks. A manual protocol for detecting cognitive chunks during sketching was reported earlier. In this research, the said protocol was automated into a software program and validated in a new protocol study, using new participants. The chunks detected by the program, by definitions in cognitive science literature, serve as entities or units of information conceived at once by the designer. The relations between these entities, esp. spatial relations, are then computed using a new method, which represents the sketch as an entity-relation (ER) model. An established protocol for measuring information of ER models is then applied to compute the information content of the sketches.