Hi Mike,
Thanks for your message. I agree that seeing drawing and maths skills as opposites is a common way to think about differences between drawing and maths in design. I'd like to invite you to look at the situation slightly differently; more as a sequence.
First, a factual correction. Most engineering designers who use maths are taught to draw and use drawing and sketching as a matter course. Almost all engineering designers are taught to sketch at University or College. It's often considered an essential aspect of engineering design courses and almost always considered essential to engineering design practice. I was taught to sketch early on and all of the engineering designers I know would say skill at sketching (both realist and symbolic) is important to engineering designing. An example of a basic first year university course of sketching for engineering designers is at http://units.handbooks.uwa.edu.au/units/mech/mech2401 see also http://www.segal.northwestern.edu/undergraduate/courses/35/
On the maths side, there are many levels and aspects to maths. In the main, school maths is simple and deterministic. Creativity comes with more advanced kinds of maths. From experience, using more advanced mathematics in design work is as creative as any sketching activity, and almost certainly uses the same parts of the brain. The interesting areas of maths concerning the dynamics of interaction of functions and their 'shapes' and behaviours is particularly of use in creative design work. This is sort of the meta-analysis of the behaviour of functions. I haven't found any Art and Design course that teaches this kind of maths. Please correct me if you know of any, I'd love to hear about it.
Maths has one advantage over sketching. It removes two of the major 'blinkers' intrinsic to any form of sketched output.
The first is maths is not limited to three dimensions. Training in mathematically-based creative thinking makes it a matter of course to think in large numbers of dimensions. It's hard to sketch an object with 3 dimensions, it's much harder still to represent an object in which one needs to take into account and represent the interactions of 20 or a 100 dimensions factors that are characteristic of the designed object and its context. Some maths approaches do this relatively effortlessly.
Second, mathematical modelling is good at addressing designs that have dynamic outcome behaviours. Sketching is not easily able to be used for representing, creating or identifying products' whose behaviour or outcomes dynamically changes over time as a result of interactions. Sketching techniques to indicate dynamics are typically limited to storyboard methods or infographic type approaches, or simple indications of motion. As far as I can tell, sketching doesn't provide any basis for predicting the dynamic behaviour of complex design outcomes that involve multiple feedback interactions.
There is a sort of sequence in the use of drawing and maths, at least in engineering design. From experience, engineering designers will first identify the difficulty and complexity of a proposed design. Then, there is a sort of sequence, in order of increasing difficulty and complexity of the design:
1. Designs that can be addressed by a single person using only sketching before creating formal drawings
2. Designs that can to be addressed by a multi-discipline team using sketching and discussion
3. Designs that can be addressed by a single person using only sketching in combination with maths
4. Designs that can to be addressed by a multi-discipline team using sketching, maths and discussion
5. Designs created by a single individual that need to be addressed primarily using mathematical modelling with some sketching
6. Designs created by a multi-discipline team that need to be addressed primarily using mathematical modelling with some sketching and discussion
7. Designs created by a multidiscipline team primarily using mathematical modelling
Sketching and discussion are used until they hit limits that are either real (those methods simply cannot do the necessary design work) or using sketching and discussion become too expensive compared to moving the design work into the mathematical realm.
Put simply, most engineering designers are trained in sketching, and I'm suggesting the evidence indicates maths get used for the more complex areas of creative design that sketching cannot, or cannot easily, address.
If you think differently, I'd love to hear.
Best wishes ,
Terry
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Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Honorary Fellow,
IEED, Management School
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
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-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Mike Zender
Sent: Thursday, 5 September 2013 12:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Perhaps it is the word "Designer" that is the problem
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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