The act of design : beyond the digital?

The aim of this paper is to discuss a very initial stage of architectural design. To achieve that, the way architects work at the early phase of design task is taken into consideration. For the purpose of analysing the process, two groups of designers are distinguished, viz.: novice and familiar with digital media. A few experiments are described in order to reveal a process of creative thinking and, what is more, to point out a hybrid analogue-digital environment as a preferred setting to study and deal with a design problem. However, it is difficult to assign the act of creation itself to certain rules and methodologies since it seems to exist somewhere beyond – elusive and unpredictable.