Why We Need to Doodle
I’ve always been a big doodler. Every notebook that I kept from high school and college is filled with shapes, lines, swirls, dots…the list goes on and on. Any time I sit down with a pen in hand and paper in front of me I will draw. In big lecture classes, I would immediately start drawing in the corners of my notebook pages. I would take tons of notes, but would continue to draw. It’s almost like my hand would start drawing before I even would think about it and then time would pass and class would be over. To others, doodling comes off as being bored or not paying attention, but in somewhat recent studies that idea has been changed.
In 2009, participants of a study were asked to listen to a long, dull phone message that listed names of people coming to a party. The participants who were encouraged to doodle remembered 29% more of the names mentioned than those who did not doodle.
Sunni Brown, doodle advocate and author of “The Doodle Revolution”, has her own creative consultancy to educate people on the power of doodling. She teaches different companies how to translate ideas into drawings, which allows them to communicate better with each other and come up with new ideas. Brown believes that doodling is one of the strongest tools we can use to help our brains retain information or allow it to create new ideas. Doodles help us think through problems and create new answers that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
In any design process one of the first steps is to sketch, sketch, and sketch. Last semester, one of the best sketching exercising was one we did as a whole. We had been working on individual design ideas and were discussing different problem points we each were having. As a class we decided on the most important points of each persons design and were given a specific amount of time to re-sketch them out. Knowing I only had five minutes to produce lots of ideas allowed me to not think to hard and got me to quickly put ideas down on paper. No idea is a bad idea! Through doing this, each of us came away with more ways of thinking about our particular design problem than we had before. Each sketch allowed our brains to re-think the problem and look at it from a different angle.
Sketching not only helps me relax, but it also helps my brain concentrate and not wonder into other directions. Now, working through design work at BDW, sketching has become one of the most important parts of the process. It allows us to visually communicate with each other and improve on each other’s ideas. Sometimes when we are talking, so many ideas flood into my brain its hard to get them out in a meaningful sentence. In those situations it becomes easier to express myself just by drawing out what I am thinking. Sometimes something will spark my interest and I quickly have to doodle out the idea that’s in my head to hold onto for later. In any situation, sketches and doodles become a very helpful and relaxing part of the process.
Sadly my doodles are currently in another state so these notebook doodles were supplied by my good friends Ashley Cummings (http://www.ashleyjoycephotography.com/home) and Michelle Sharp
