Exploring the effect of bodily experience on architecture students' generating spatial ideas: a case study

We aim to unfold the discussions on architects’ way of interacting with digital media through phenomenological approach which have common foundations in philosophy, human-computer interaction and cognitive science. This paper is an attempt to understand the nature and aesthetic dimensions of bodily experience acquired and expressed through hand gestures and to explore the role of this bodily experience in the way architects develop spatial ideas. Our aim is to explore if there are repetitive gestural or common behaviour patterns among different students during the externalization of design ideas. As an experimental study, we evaluate half an hour modelling exercise with two participants, both master's level architecture students. We analyse the way in which gestural interaction and the vocabulary of verbal description is affected when the designers communicate increasingly complex and abstract spatial relations or metaphoric concepts.