Uncertainty in Communication with a Sketch

Abstract

Sketches are one of the main tools for the communication of design ideas during the conceptual phase of the design process. In design communication, one of the major problems is the uncertainty associated with imprecisely defined sketches. There is a need to understand the uncertainty in the communication with sketches. This motivated the formulation of the research question: can uncertainty in communication with a sketch be quantified? To answer the research question, three specific aims were developed, namely, (1) determine the ranking of the features in a sketch, (2) determine the probability of importance of the features in a sketch, and (3) quantify the uncertainty of a sketch using Shannon’s normalized entropy. This paper demonstrates the effective use of the established framework for the quantification of uncertainty and contributes to the improvement of design communication with a sketch.