About Erasing and Traces

Our reflection about traces leads us to the observation of a collaborative architectural design activity carried out by means of digital tools. Our aim is to understand how a drawing becomes a trace within an interactional process and how the value of this trace is preserved (or not) beyond the current situation, and especially during an evaluation conducted by teachers. The assumption which underlies our analyses is that the interaction is a place of meaning construction and knowledge intelligibility. We will focus on an interactional sequence in which two students in Master degree of Architecture are negotiating the value of a drawing that has just been erased by one of them. This trace, suddenly missing and “redrawn”, allows us to analyse the conditions and the motivations of its production.