On Thu, June 5, 2014 11:14 am, Charles Burnette wrote:
> as designers, we have no underlying
> neuroscientific findings to support our
> experiential knowledge and insights. Evidence for our theories on the
> relationship between drawing and thinking, however good they might be,
> will need such evidence to make our case.
I assume that we need several sorts of evidence, including (but not limited to) neuroscientific findings. I'm also guessing that we may learn that there are several aspects of this question and that the importance of each aspect may chance depending on the circumstance and the manner of drawing. (It might also vary with the individual. Who knows?)
I'll add to the non-scientific speculation by going over the first steps we require of graphic design students at East Carolina University with some speculation on how drawing might aid the development of the student and her project:
1) word lists: The New York Times article that started this thread, "What's Lost as Handwriting Fades," and related research might indicate that printing them by hand helps certain sorts of thinking and memory.
The next step for word lists is sorting the word list by subject as the first of several possible exercises for increasing the list. (It's easier to add to several smaller lists with cues than to one larger list so a word list for a retailer might be broken down into stuff for sale [or even subset lists of stuff for sale], and location, themes such as national origins of the goods sold, etc.) One could argue for efficiencies in an electronic word list for sorting as balancing any presumed cognitive advantage. I don't know.
It would also be interesting to know how people (especially design students) regard a hand printed list of words vs. the same list typeset. The graphic design work first shown to clients often used to be less finished than it is now. My experience is that pencil sketches seemed more preliminary so the invited a different sort of discussion from the tendency toward a binary yes/no reaction to more finished work. Do handwritten words seem to exist on a different level than typeset words? What effect does that have on moving the ideas the words represent forward?
2) vocabulary sketching (i.e., the visual equivalent of word lists, not initial sketches of a proposed end product): I believe that the act of drawing rather than, say, copying images from a Google search engages the imagination and allows more freedom. My observation is that it also tends to drive imagery toward being more reductive thus ultimately more quickly recognizable. Working with (rather than merely transferring) a thing seems to involve a sort of relationship with things that is very helpful in the design process. There are also questions of speed (partly but not completely based on the fact that many of our beginning students have been wielding a pencil for years but are new to Bezier curves.)
3) identification of potential and expansion: My belief is that the level of sketching of multiple images can even out the quality of the options, avoiding the tendency to favor images that have already been worked out by a previous image maker, those that happen to be photographed well or high resolution, etc. and making the choice between sketches more about conceptual and visual potential than the choice between found images.
4) Only after that do we get into more questions about the relationship between the maker and the ideas embodied in the thing being made. It's been fifty years since William Carlos Williams died so he can't tell us if his phrase "no ideas but in things" has any bearing on this.
5) Then there are formal questions. Does someone drawing feel a curve as well as see it? If it is ultimately going to be visual rather than haptic, does that affect the quality of the outcome?
There are enough questions on this to keep neuroscientists busy for at least a couple of weeks.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
[log in to unmask]
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258-7006
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
