This paper reports a human-subject protocol study examining the cognitive process of freehand sketching during design ideation and presents empirical evidence for the presence of chunking during sketching. Volunteer designers sketched solution concepts to unseen design problems using a homegrown software program on a tablet computer to draw their sketches, which performed a time study and identified pen stroke clusters. These clusters were found to be strongly correlated with the sketched objects that the designers voluntarily named during labelling, irrespective of the object's containment level in the sketched solution. The frequent occurrence of single-private clusters, where all pen strokes in a cluster are used to draw a single named object, provides evidence for cognitive chunking during ideation sketching.

本文报告了一项人与人之间的协议研究，研究了设计构思期间徒手绘制草图的认知过程，并提供了在草图绘制过程中存在分块的经验证据。志愿者设计师使用平板电脑上的本地软件程序绘制解决方案概念，以解决看不见的设计问题，并绘制草图，然后进行时间研究并确定笔划簇。发现这些聚类与设计人员在标注过程中自愿命名的草绘对象紧密相关，而与草绘解决方案中对象的包含级别无关。单一私有群集的频繁出现，其中群集中的所有笔触都用于绘制单个命名的对象，这为构思草图期间的认知分块提供了证据。