Castle in the air: a strategy to model shapes in a computer

During the early design explorations, designers and architects tend to treat freehand sketching as a mirror of their mind. The spontaneity of conventional sketching is undoubtedly important for the designer´s thinking process. CAD systems and the contrived interfaces do not offer the advantage that sketching does. Can modern technology offer a tool that the designers would readily accept for their creative explorations? The study is based on a visualization of a hypothetical system, where the designer develops a representation of 3D shapes of reasonable complexity, sitting in front of a terminal. Using his gestures and limited speech, he inputs into the computer an online representation of shape. This feedback is available to the designer live on his monitor. The experiments reported test this hypothetical system using simulation. Gestures involve spatial movements and they could be more convenient tools for the designers to express spatial ideas. Keeping modeling of shapes in the computer during the act of design as a focus of this study, this paper aims to identify the potentials and limitations of the natural gestures as a source of shape information