"Visual Analogy" and its Position in Creative Education of Architectural Design

This paper describes "Drawing Analogies", a shape based reminding program that uses freehand sketches to index and retrieve visual references for creative architectural designing.Architecture students and professional designers often employ reference images from books, magazines and other visual collections to find new forms and adapt them into their designs. Many designers indicate that, what architects imagine is the represent of what they have seen. So, it is evident that visual elements play a key role in design process. However, many architects believe that imagination is an essential factor in art and design while the investigation on its importance in architecture education is thoroughly neglected. In this paper, we investigate on imagination and analogy as potential aids to creative design and education. Some examples of how the designers use drawing and describe their approach to find similar visual analogies are also presented. We argue that a graphical reminding scheme based on sketching can help the designers to find interesting references from various domains. Finally, we discuss the ways of using diagrams and freehand sketches as visual sources and explain how students can retrieve them in creative architectural design process.