ISO 27000

Phenomenography gives us a way of thinking about, a way of tackling or making sense of some of the complexity of factors raised up to this point. What it does not do is provide ready answers. It does not offer a recipe for how to go about the study, nether does it prescribe certain methods or techniques. Marton and Booth (1997) explain that:

Phenomenography is not a method in itself. Although there are methodological elements

associated with it ... Phenomenography is rather a way of - an approach to - identifying,

formulating and tackling certain sorts of research questions, a specialization that is

particularly aimed at questions of relevance to learning and understanding in an

educational setting. (Marton and Booth 1997 p111)

This places the onus on the researcher to design and implement the investigation in response to their understanding of the phenomenon under investigation and the issues surrounding it. As with any designing the design becomes clearer and more exact as the process unfolds. The synergies showed us the close relationship between designing and learning and, as with learning, designing deals with wholes as well as parts. How then can we see this study as a whole?

This investigation is concerned with identifying and describing the qualitatively different ways students go about sketching when designing. So how do we identify these? Chapter 3 established that to understand the way a student is going about their sketching, or in other words the manner or the approach a student takes to their sketching involves understanding the 'what' and the 'how' aspects of their sketching and the way they are related. The 'what' or direct object of sketching concerns what is being sketched and the 'how' or act of sketching concerns how the student goes about sketching. The following Figure 4a depicts these two aspects as separate experiences which can be analyzed in terms of a structure of awareness. Each experience is described in terms of related structural and referential

HOW

how a student goes about sketching

(the act) WHAT

what a student is sketching (the direct object)

Structural aspects Meaning (referential aspects) ground figure Structural aspects Meaning (referential aspects) ground figure

A WAY OF SKETCHING

Figure 4a. Describing a way of sketching

Source: Adapted from Marton and Booth 1997.

aspects, the structural aspects in terms of a particular figure-ground relationship and the referential as an intertwined meaning. When a student sketches in a different way, what and/or how she is sketching is different and she is holding more or fewer aspects of the phenomenon simultaneously present in her awareness and/or related in different ways. That is, the structure of her awareness associated with her sketching is different.

With the object of study focused on identifying and describing the different ways students are sketching, how do we elicit students' experiences of sketching and what form should these experiences take?

If the outcomes of this study are to be useful to students the sketching under investigation needs to be generated, collected and considered within the setting of designing. It is critical that the sketching constitutes a student’s actual design response closely resembling how students usually go about their designing. Only in being so, can the sketching be considered authentic and reliable. In the way we ask students to sketch their design response, they need to be free to sketch what they want and in the way they want to go about it. This needs to be consistent across all of the participants, so as to enable one students' sketching to be considered in relation to another. To fully see and to value the intricacies, the complexity, the hesitations and the subtleties of expressions associated with the different ways students go about their sketching, all their sketches will need to be taken into consideration when collected,

analysed and interpreted as each and every one of their sketches has made a contribution to the development of their design response. The messy and the unfinished are of as much value as the polished and precise. The sketches will need to be seen as part of a sequence, their relative position, line weight, prominence and character within the design sequence significant. Looking from the sketches to the students, it is not the experience of any one particular student that is of interest but rather the different ways students experience sketching. It is not an individual's voice but rather the collective voice in focus and the description reached is a description of the variation on a collective level. In this way, individuals seen as are bearers of fragments of different ways of experiencing a

phenomenon (Marton and Booth 1997). In order to maximize the potential to observe such variation, a group of students within which one would expect to find a range of experiences is needed (Bowden and Green 2005). The researcher for this study needs to be able to view the sketching with an architectural eye, an eye experienced in reading the uncertain and often difficult to make out sketching of students. She needs to have an appreciation of the complexities of architectural designing and at the same time an appreciation of what designing students, as distinct from experienced practitioners, are capable of doing, an understanding likely to be found in someone who teaches. A teaching background would also assist the researcher in giving form to the findings in a way which is of use to both students in their learning and teachers in their teaching in the design studio.

Phenomenographic research using text based transcripts of interviews as their data provides principles which can be applied to visual data and offers a way of moving forward (for example Bowden and Green 2005). However early freehand design sketching brings to the fore a range of issues particular to its architectural character, its design setting and the personal nature of its expression which this study has to deal with. With an understanding that for some, phenomenographic research is a process of

discovery, and knowing discovering is an integral part of designing, this study needs to move forward in a way which allows new things as they come up to loop back into and inform the movement forward. Shifting direction the course was irregular and needing of constant adjustment. This way of moving forward is responsive to opportunities newly seen and a way of working this researcher is used to and values in architectural practice.

Bowden is of the opinion that in developmental phenomenographic research undertaken with the purpose of using the outcomes to help students learn, as much focus is needed on the subjects of the study and on the nature of the data collection process as on the phenomenon under study (Bowden 2000). The following pages look in detail at how the student sample was chosen, the way the design response was elicited, how students were presented with the design task, the nature of their responses and offers an example. Care is taken to make explicit why decisions were taken and to describe the

manner in which the study was conducted, making apparent this researcher's commitment to being truthful to students and to their sketching. The students' loose, evocative and fresh sketching has been an ongoing source of inspiration through the lengthy and at times less than obvious passage of this exploration.