SKETCHING: The ongoing importance of free-hand drawing

As irreplaceable as 3D CAD is to the design process, sketching by hand is still a necessary skill. Architects have a phrase, "don't talk about it, draw it." Words will gloss over all the difficulties, a drawing exposes the difficulties and forces a resolution.

The sketch included here is a combination of the "just draw it" philosophy and a method I learned in a design course from architect Tom Meyer of MS&R Architects while I was a student in the University of Minnesota architecture school. He calls this "talk drawing." The idea is to record design thinking in both drawings and words side by side on the same piece of paper -- and to actually talk outloud. If you leave and come back to this "talk drawing", you have a rich source of material to review to get your mind back into all of the myriad issues that can be at play. The visual-spatial and the verbal-analytical parts of the brain are both fully engaged in this kind of drawing.

This particular drawing deals with a number of issues that came up in the middle of the rapid prototyping process (during the decision to decrease the size from a 2" to a 1 1/2" cube). Among the issues are the supporting ribs inside the cube, the spherical shape of the interior, and the unification of the side joinery elements into a single horseshoe shape.

At the top of this post, I include the detail zoom into the drawing mostly because pencil on paper looks so amazing. You can SEE the thought process in the lines, the erasures, the pressure on the pencil, in a way that is just never revealed in CAD drawings. 

If you look closely, you'll see that this was drawn on the back side of a Private Placement Memorandum I was writing in parallel with the design process, in order to raise money for the business. I was at my local Dunn Bros coffee shop reviewing the PPM and did not have a computer at hand. An ability to draw free-hand allowed me to get some important thinking done when inspiration hit. But another reason for approaching a design problem with sketching and plaster and CAD and rapid-prototyping, is that different things are noticed, different insights gained in each method. So it is not so much that one process is more important or better than another, I think the important thing is to have a multi-faceted process that will help bring out all of the issues.

This is post #4 in a series on "The Making of Q-BA-MAZE"