【正文】
uce the notions of shape rules and shape grammars and particularly to establish the phenomenon of subshapes. 1 Cleary any pictorial representation of a design ,such as sketches, can be formally represented as a shape, and any design elements that can be perceived to be a feature of the design can be formally represented as subshapes. 1 Shape grammars are defined according to sets of rules, and an initial shape to which these rules can be successively applied. They have been used as a means for analyzing designs in professions such as architecture and product design. 1 In order to formally describe shape transformations in sketches in a way that reflects the path followed by the designer more information is required than can be provided by merely viewing the sketches. 1 The experiment consisted of a series of design tasks that involved sketching. Eight professional industrial designers, four professional architects and two researchers in the field of architecture participated in this study. All participants had more than 3 years of professional experience in their respective disciplines. 1 In both tasks participants were told that their first sketches should be a copy of the given staring concept as a mon reference point and after that they were free to explore their own variations of the design concept. 1 While sketching, designers made use of an A4 paperbased digital notepad this gave the dual advantage of resembling a traditional pencilandpaper environment whilst facilitating the recording of pen stokes via screen capture software. 1 Participants produced a total of just under 300 sketches and these were categorized by tasks for each participant. In our analysis the sketches were analyzed as abstract shapes, without regard to function or meaning. 1 During analysis, the sketches were first ordered according to the sequence in which they were produced and then clustered for each individual designer into design families – groups of designs that represent variations of the same idea. 1 Each individual sketch is also labeled with a letter and a number. The letters identify which design families sketches belong to and the numbers indicate the number in the sequence in which the sketches were produced. Once the sketches were arranged and clustered into design families, shape transformations between subsequent sketches were identified and described in the form of shape rules. 2 In order to develop a higherlevel understanding of the shape transformations represented in these specific rules, they were grouped into general shape rule types and rule schemas. 2 While the general rules presented here may be sufficient to capture the shape transformations of these particular participants the set of rules is not assumed to be plete, 2 Structure transformations are mainly used to explore different spatial relations between elements. Because Structure transformations tend to affect the layout of a design they are more likely to lead to radical changes than Outline transformations. 2 A shape