Abstract
Design concepts play a crucial role in guiding the mental action during the design task, because they represent the media which support the design goals and strategy, these concepts are vary according to the design circumstance, the type of building and the designer. It is difficult to capture these concepts through the design product in architecture and urban design that due to the difficulty of conceptual perception by the designer and the difficulty of delivering overall conceptual message from architect to others. This problem exacerbate in the students design behavior in architectural study, due to the inadequacy of the experience that they enjoy in the design work, and inappropriate election of the concepts to solve the design problem
This research attempts to draw the design action and its change during a design experiment carried out by students in the final stage of architectural study (in urban design studio), to highlight the variation between this action and the change of design concept to indicate preferences elements of this concept by the student in the message delivery to the recipient, and thus his/her success in completing the work.
The research tries to measure the thinking performance of the student within eight design sessions, through classifying design concept submitted by him/her and drop it into (Rasmussen) model of thinking performance Finally the research will try to find obstacles in the election of certain types of design concepts in urban design projects on the total thinking production.
Keywords: design concepts, architectural education, design thinking, productive thinking
