What does doodling have to do with flow?
After 2 wonderful years working as a Project and Product Manager at the social startup Ticket for Change, I felt the need to go deeper in one of my favorite field: User Experience Design.
To do so, I enrolled in a 9-week bootcamp dedicated to UX/UI Design that will start on September at IronHack Paris — no need to say that I am crazily excited!
Until then, I have to finish a 60-hour pre-work session at home. And this is where this story begins!
Today, my focus was on the chapter called “Sketching for User Experience Design”. I have to confess that I was a bit skeptical about it —I wouldn’t introduce myself as a talented drawer and couldn’t see the urge of working on that now, since most of our work would be digital anyway!
I dove into it and became, against my expectations, quickly very interested:
Our brain process concepts in verbal and visual modes. When we are discussing and sketching ideas, we cross-reference these 2 processes, forming a visual map. This keeps the brain fully engaged — in a creative flow.
Reading this made me suddenly remember precise moments of work where I felt — indeed, in my flow.
You guess it, most of theses moments included working with just a pen and paper, writing or sketching what my thoughts were. Wow!
I kept on reading the chapter:
Screens and interfaces create a disconnect between our mind and the output, interrupting this crucial flow for idea generation, which is why sketching is the most effective tool for design ideation.
Well, well, well! Now I definitely understand better why I feel so often stuck in front of a computer, while it seems sometimes easier on a piece of paper! It also explains why some of my best — or at least clearer — ideas came while taking notes during insomnias!
Then, what’s next?
As IronHack’s pedagogy is “Learning by Doing”, they immediately suggested to give it a try! Nice, because I was then very curious to see what I could do — even though I didn’t expect any miracle with my drawing skills!
To do so, they recommend first to have a look at this cool Sketchnote Handbook. So did I — and I found very nice pieces of inspiration in it!
And then do Visual Note-Taking of the following TED Talk:
So that’s what I also did. And here is the result:
I would lie if I tell you it didn’t take me a little while… About 2 hours and countless tiny corrections for a 13-minute video!
And I still don’t even know if someone who hasn’t seen the video would be able to understand it clearly — nice paradox for a first UX exercise, right? ;-)
But what is completely incredible is that I did (and felt the need of doing) NO BREAK AT ALL!
When was the last time you’ve worked without craving for a social media break or a little chat with a friend?
Again: WOW!
Will I do Visual Note-Taking again? We’ll see, but I definitely recommend to start every creative or analysis work by sketching with only a pen and paper rather than a computer!
You should also give it a try as soon as possible, and tell me how it was!
