Don, 

I agree with you so often and so thoroughly that I hate to take issue but your recent post badly misses the mark several ways, most egregiously regarding “sketching” (I’ll adopt your reference to sketching as a catch-all for ‘art-based’ training in visual form, and I’ll use “you” as a symbol for the non-art-trained designers of the world who don’t know how to draw and have little-no training is making visual form. As the movies say, any relation to the real person Donald Norman may be purely coincidental!!). 

It’s no surprise that someone who never learned to draw thinks drawing is irrelevant. But you’re wise enough that I’m sure you’ll be the first to agree that ignorance is no qualification for opinion. 

“Sketching’ is the hallmark of designers whose hallmark is innovation. There’s a large body of literature on the visual language, visual thinking, and thinking with images. Stephen Kosslyn comes to mind. Colin Ware. David Hubbel. These scholars define and explore the roles of visual. Each domain has a prototypical means of expression, a symbol language, that matches well it’s ways of functioning and thinking: its role, its value: it’s contribution to society. Saying the same thing in a different way, different symbol systems produce different kinds of thinking. Drawing and math are different symbol systems that both represent and inform thought. Engineers do math. Designers draw. Math is precise, logical, analytical, propositional, linear; drawing is creative, open-ended, literal, abstract (yes, it’s both without contradiction), relational, emotional, readily suited for converting tacit to explicit with minimal encoding. “Artistically trained” designers, of which I am one, sketch to think. Drawing produces a different kind of thinking, more free, innovative, than thinking embodied in math or verbal language. 

I note in passing that a large percent (some say more than half) of the cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, is devoted to visual processing. Artists are intellectuals who employ a different form of thinking. Who would argue that Picasso, Stravinsky, and Martha Graham were not prime shapers of the 20th century. Howard Gardner thought so and lumped them in with Einstein (whose language was math) in his book about genius. 

Designers who draw have an important advantage when it comes to problem solving, creation, and innovation (all key features of design) over those who design who don’t draw because ‘art-based’ designers have available to them a more innovative, creative language for thinking. 

Additionally, all art-based designers have learned to do math (somewhere, and most hated it), most math-based designers haven’t learned to draw. While I do math I’m aware that I’m no mathematician. You were right on with your analogy with tennis professionals, I respect the difference between my math flash cards and those who are adept. Those who never learned to draw in their ignorance devalue those who can, while the drawers among us who also do math can see that our mathematical brethren are trying to design with half a language! You need to get over it by taking some drawing classes! Come over to the dark AND light side and see how it looks over here!

Everyone designs, without doubt. There’s agreement again! But a designer who converts the existing to preferred (did I mention engineers are good at defining things?!?) must by definition be creative, innovative, and I argue that math and verbal language can’t get you there as well as drawing, sketching, visual thinking can. 

I too was at IASDR this past week. I observed there more than ever that Engineers and Designers are different species. We need each other, but that doesn’t make us each other. In the need for respectful collaboration you were, again, spot on. But I think it’s a mistake to try to make an Engineer a Designer and mean the same thing. It was painful to watch so many engineer-designers who just don’t get it, think they are innovative because they can use the word innovation. They can analyze innovation. They can increment small changes (innovations? not by my dictionary definition). They can even turn emotion into a formula for crying out loud! Because they can’t draw, they analyze. Because designers draw, sketch, conceptualize and analyze visually (and do math on the side), they create and innovate in ways those who don’t ‘think and speak visually’ can’t.

That’s how I see it anyway.

Mike Zender


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