Architects when sketching take time to pause, to look, to sketch, to look and sketch again. Described by some as the passing of an idea, a place or an experience from eye to mind to hand, the act of sketching is a means by which architects come to see and to understand the unfolding outcomes of their designing and make sense of aspects of the world. For many practitioners, scholars and eminent architects, sketching is fundamental to their architectural disposition and an integral part of thinking in an architectural way. To become architects, students need to learn this kind of sketching and few students in the early years of their studies are able to sketch in this way. Experience in teaching reveals architecture students are able to produce sketches, yet many struggle to grasp how to use their sketching as an integral part of their thinking and of progressing their designing. Far too rarely is using sketching an explicit focus of teaching and learning in the design studio. This research is directed towards understanding the different ways students are sketching when designing, on the basis that understanding these ways provides a useful and appropriate basis upon which to found improvements in teaching and learning about sketching in the design studio. Synergies between architectural sketching, visual thinking and how students learn, give rise to an investigation into the ways students are sketching, its approach, the form and collection of the data, the tools of analysis and means of interpretation founded on what is shared. The phenomenographic perspective on teaching and learning (Marton and Booth 1997) provides a means to analyse students' sketching, its iterative and interwoven cycles of considering, discovering and reinterpreting, suited to making sense of and seeing below the surface of the loose, searching and at times unclear design sketching. The analysis findings identify and describe differences in what and how students are sketching and are synthesized into a visual framework of 'palettes', describing three different and increasingly complex ways students are sketching. Using the descriptive framework in the studio offers students and teachers, through the understanding it depicts and the language it provides, opportunity to see, to make sense of, to compare, to complement, to improve and to discuss their own sketching and the sketching of others, and in so doing provides a means by which to help bring sketching into being an explicit focus of the day to day exchanges which lie at the core of learning in the design studio. Consideration is given to how teaching and learning in the studio might change were sketching to take this focus
