PROJECT
Designers routinely abstract features from existing objects and ideas before expressing them in new forms. This project investigates that distinctly human capacity by examining how architecture students interpret and reconstruct architectural precedents using Lego bricks.

APPROACH
Students represented real-world architectural works using the constrained vocabulary of Lego. Their design activity was then analyzed to understand how information is selected, transformed, and transferred between the source and the emerging representation.

CONTRIBUTION
The study uses a simple design task to expose otherwise difficult-to-observe processes of abstraction and knowledge transfer. Beyond design education, these insights suggest directions for computational design agents capable of reasoning through abstraction.