Drawing a blank? Try sketching.
Once you know how to steal like an artist, the next question might be how to iterate on borrowed design heuristics. Sketching is a perfect and possibly the easiest tool for idea shaping — but there’s even more to its place in the wider picture.
Be it on your preferred digital medium or in a notepad, conceptual sketches are probably part of your toolkit already. Still, there is a good chance that these humble inklings are not getting the credit they deserve.
The process of sketching can sometimes feel like a lesser part of creative work, lacking any sense of glamour and just being a drudge really. It could be seen as just a pile of bare bones that may or may not contribute to the final skeleton of your design. But before you enthusiastically skip this step, spare a minute or two to consider its benefits and overarching purpose.
In conversation with the drawing
Put simply, conceptual sketching can serve as the building block of your creative ideation and a major contributor to the sequenced nature of design. Research by Alexandre Menezes and Bryan Lawson cites two core visitors when you get pen to paper: emergence and reinterpretation. This duo of players join the game during the early design activity, which would be the abstract, brainstorming phase of your creative genius.
First, the way you interact with these drafts helps facilitate the emergence of new thoughts and ideas that were not anticipated. (These are the lightbulb moments you experience during your creative process, basically.)
Meanwhile, reinterpretation “refers to the ability to transform, develop and generate new images” whilst sketching. (If I were to carry on with the metaphor, I would say this is where the brightness coming from said lightbulb allows you to see more clearly, and hence, get working).
The good news? You don’t have to be the most skilful of artists, because the way how you interact with your sketches is more important than your physical abilities. Your thought process and reflections are the game-changers rather than how well you can draw a perfect circle. The role of sketching might actually be more substantial in shaping your overall design cognition — and that’s pretty cool, don’t you think?
Naturally, we can also shift this logic upside-down. (Sorry.) On the other hand, a 2012 study shows that higher-quality sketches are perceived as being more creative compared to a lower-quality version, even if the same idea is being presented by both. So, whilst you might be reaping the cognitive benefits either way, if there is an audience to cater to, you will have to get your Picasso hat on.
Design thinking & design reasoning
Idea sketches, study sketches, usability and memory sketches are all examples of concept sketches, but you can also turn this around and look at the sketching concept instead.
As researchers Self and Pei note in a 2016 article, “in this way, we now focus attention on the designer as a user of the tool of sketching rather than the sketch itself.” Feeling confused? We are talking about your creative brain now.
One of the strengths of sketching lies within the ambiguity of it. The imprecision and mental flexibility that comes with getting creative on fleeting and forgiving blank slates allows for multiple interpretations, stimulating the production of more design alternatives. This all leads to a fun, interchanging combination of gradual formalisation and rapid exploration of possibilities.
In fact, cognitive neuroscientist Vinod Goel argued in his book, Sketches of Thought, that sketching supports design thinking in ways that more limited and precise representations cannot. The myriad little subconscious connections that are built with each rough drawing end up playing a role in and effectively contributing to your design reasoning.
Connections between designing, drawing, and interpreting
As you keep looking through your iterations and adding more to the pile, the cycle feeds into itself. Before you know it, you end up:
- finding visual analogies,
- remembering, then integrating relevant examples,
- and discovering new methods based on previously not recognised solutions.
Whilst the activities involved in designing, drawing, and interpreting might not be easy to separate, researchers Do and Gross gave it a try in a 1996 study, nonetheless. To this end, they compiled a list to show how the lower-level tasks of drawing and interpreting serve the bigger picture of design. This breakdown also aimed to illustrate how the goals of design might direct the drawing and interpreting activities.
Their findings confirmed that the act of drawing supports multiple cognitive activities (through interpreting sketches) that are important in design. The moral of the story: there is literally more to sketching than meets the eye.
En route to design
Without getting too much into the weeds, sketches and illustrations can also be categorised via a taxonomy chunking them by levels of detail, fidelity and which phase of the design process they fit into.
These stages can run along the route of explorative, persuasive, explanatory and prescriptive categories, according to authors Self and Pei.
These examples just stand to show that ambiguous and casual sketches are more influential during the explorative phase of conceptual design ideation, and serve their purpose all the same.
The three major activities in design
If going by research, we can also define the core acts in design as finding references, drawing analogies and making evaluations.
What is meant by finding references is seeking out and depending on previous similar designs to study, for example. Not sure where to start? Design heuristics could prove a worthy aid.
Since drawing, well, draws on memories, visual analogies are retrieved in the process, which then make their way into your sketches. With each pen stroke or click, you map and adapt these analogies into the design domain of your work, testing if they can be applied to your case.
Drawing also facilitates a continuous evaluation of alternatives against goals, even as these goals keep changing during the design process. This can relate to updates in dimensional or shape criteria, to give you an idea.
Whichever medium you choose for your sketching process, the cognitive benefits should be clear by now. Apart from helping you refine ideas and facilitate additional discoveries, drawing actually shapes your “design brain,” as well. So, pens at the ready…? Ready, sketch, go!
Thanks for reading! ⭐
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References & Credits:
- Do, E. Y. L., & Gross, M. D. (1996, June). Drawing as a means to design reasoning. In AI and Design.
- Kudrowitz, B., Te, P., & Wallace, D. (2012). The influence of sketch quality on perception of product-idea creativity. AI EDAM, 26(3), 267–279.
- Goel, V. (1995). Sketches of thought. MIT press.
- Menezes, A., & Lawson, B. (2006). How designers perceive sketches. Design studies, 27(5), 571–585.
- Self, J. A., & Pei, E. (2016). Why is Sketching (Still) Important (To Design)?.
- Images by storyset on Freepik
