Hi Gunnar
thanks so much - I’ll look at the link you sent with interest.
Just want to be clear about my focus in this: I’m not (in the first instance) thinking about drawing for product design development. Nor for “ skilled art” drawings ( regardless of how much I appreciate them).
When I ask the question about which tree to draw, I’m thinking ( first of all) about how the activity of drawing impacts on the designer/person doing the drawing. How that educational activity shapes their own body-mind. Then from there - how that shape can enable understanding, if not empathy, for the health and wellbeing of those that will be affected by the outcomes of the designer/person's work.
I am aware that design education (at undergraduate level at least), tends on the whole to operate between aesthetics and commerce i.e. it has a primary focus on how to produce a viable product that can be manufactured, and will sell. There are rarely any health and wellbeing course components, either taught or experiential. Yet the two objectives are not mutually exclusive. Designers turn social ideology into material form ( yes?) and so have significant opportunities to influence people’s lives, including their health and wellbeing.
I wonder what you and other list members think?
Fiona
On 7 Jun 2014, at 17:55, Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Childhood development is way, way out of my areas of expertise but my impression is that childhood development and art ed people see a shift in drawing from something that is seemingly diagrammatic--a tree symbol or the image of "family"--to something more observational--an attempt to visually record particular visual attributes of a particular tree or specific persons. [We're running up against the limits of my knowledge on the subject so I'll end this comment at that.]
>
> Fiona--Your question about which tree you should draw in order to learn about design is apt. Different sorts of drawing are useful in different ways.
>
> You outline two benefits of observational drawing--training in observation and development of discipline. We have some excellent drawing teachers here at East Carolina University but they tend to teach observational drawing which then melds into lessons in creating "good drawings," i.e., drawings that are recognized as a skilled art product. Those of us in design are pushing for observational drawing plus communicative drawing--how to draw to record your ideas so you can understand them better, add to them, and communicate them better to others--as part of a program of teaching ideation.
>
> There is a range of sorts of prototyping. The IDSA has a very interesting system analysis available at http://www.idsa.org/id-cards-now-available-free-pdf-download. I haven't had the time to examine it in detail but I think some of their thinking should be adapted for other design areas. There's also need for a similar look at how drawing/prototyping works in art. I think that this understanding will be very valuable in design and art education.
>
>
> Gunnar
>
> Gunnar Swanson
> East Carolina University
> graphic design program
>
> http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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