4 reasons why drawing is great!
As a design tool.
I draw a lot. I’m not the most gifted of drawers, but that’s beside the point. I actually make a great deal out of doing bad drawings, because it puts people at ease. When they’re at ease they’re more likely to jump in and start drawing too. I often ask people to draw with me. If I find myself having a discussion and I feel like I’m missing the point, I often ask people to draw their thoughts, so they become more tangible. It may be a model, a design or just a plain argument. I ask them to draw for me, because it helps externalize an idea and create a common ground for understanding the idea. It also moves the focus from the person to the drawing, thereby removing the feeling of being personally attacked.
In my work as a designer we often use drawings to externalize and investigate ideas, to trigger group discussions, to help stakeholders to evaluate proposals, to convey information for other members of the design team, to describe a user experience and communicate narratives or to do collaborative brainstorms. In other words. We draw a lot.
Here’s four reasons why we do this and why I think drawing is an important part of design practice and something you should try to practice in your everyday life.
1. Drawing is about communicating ideas
This is the obvious communicative function of drawing: you have some existing thoughts or ideas and set these down on paper so that someone else can understand the same things that you do. A designer may make a sketch of a user scenario in order to convey the structure, experience or appearance of a service to a client. The process may not be perfect. The drawings on the paper may not perfectly capture the idea or picture in your head. The impression in your user’s or client’s heads may be not be the same as in your own. However, it is achieving a communicative purpose and allows people to literally build on your idea with their pencils. Just hand them the paper.
2. Drawing is about forming ideas
When drawing you often end up knowing more than you did before. This is weird if you regard externalization solely as an act of communication. The act of drawing demands a particular picture; what was before a vague or fuzzy thought now becomes specific and concrete. The process of elaboration and externalization of thoughts changes the thoughts. Rather than pre-existing ideas being represented in an external form, the idea is itself formed in the process of presentation.
3. Drawing is about transforming ideas
While the informational function is most obvious when considering communication media, for those involved in service or product design the most important thing is that the external representation has properties that can be used to help understand or plan different outcomes. Donald Schön refers to the “back talk” of the situation, a part of the knowing in action. In problem solving research it is well known that changes of representation can offer obvious solutions to what appeared to be intractable problems. The move from internal to external is the most radical transformation of all. It is the function of externalization as an augmentation of cognitive activity that is critical.
4. Drawing is about having fun
Most important of all: drawing is a lot of fun!
That’s it for now. There’s a ton of other reasons. Try make a drawing and you will surely discover some yourself!
Take care, Nils Oskar
