Drawing & Sketching
Kengo Kuma's sketches
Combinations and arrangements
Everything designed has an element of arbitrariness in its form. Loewy described how groups of his designers used to go about designing a new model automobile. Different groups were given different tasks, such as the front and rear of the car, and the conceptual work began, to be cut off at some predetermined time by deadlines that were imposed at the outset. After a time, there were "piles of rough sketches," and Loewy saw the design proceed as follows:
Now the important process of elimination begins. From the roughs, I select the designs that indicate germinal direction. Those that show the greatest promise are studied in detail, and these in turn are used in combination or arrangements with one another. A promising front treatment can be tried in combination with a likely side elevation sketch, etc. From this a new set of designs emerges. These are then sketched in detail. After careful analysis, they boil down to four or five.
This tactile form of doodling
Paper clips have also served as objects of more inwardly directed aggression by providing something for the fingers to twist grotesquely out of shape during phone calls, interviews, and meetings. This tactile form of doodling may consume only a fraction of the twenty billion paper clips produced each year, but it underscores the almost limitless functions to which a single form can lead.
From the desk of: Austin Kleon
How do you work?
When I get home, I have two desks in my office — one’s “analog” and one’s “digital.” The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on the desk — this is how I keep myself off Twitter, etc. This is where most of my work is born. The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, my Wacom tablet, and a MIDI keyboard controller for if I want to record any music. (Like a lot of writers, I’m a wannabe musician.) This is where I edit, publish, etc.
Drawing as a means of thinking
Two-dimensional plans or sections can be seen with sketches and more diagrammatic marks all on the same piece of paper in what appears a confusing jumble.’ These sound like Gordon’s ‘wonder plots’. The architects also use their drawings as a means of thinking ‘aloud’, or ‘talking to themselves’, as Gordon put it. For example, Lawson reports the architect Richard MacCormac as saying, ‘I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery’; and the engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava as saying, ‘To start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things and then you start doing layer after layer.... it is very much a dialogue.’
The common elements in these similar descriptions are the use of drawing not only as a means of externalising cognitive images but also of actively ‘thinking by drawing’, and of responding, layer after layer and view after view, to the design as it emerges in the drawings. These observations also confirm Schön’s observation of designing as a ‘reflective conversation’ between the designer and the emerging design. It is the reliance on drawing, and the preference for the immediacy of the interaction and feedback that manual drawing gives, that makes the architects, like Gordon Murray, unenthusiastic about CAD as a conceptual design tool.
Drawing for parallel design thinking
An important feature of their strategy is parallel working - keeping design activity going at many levels simultaneously. The best cognitive aid for supporting and maintaining parallel design thinking is drawing. Drawing with the conventional tools of paper and pencil gives the flexibility to shift levels of detail instantaneously; allows partial, different views at different levels of detail to be developed side by side, or above and below and overlapping; keeps records of previous views, ideas and notes that can be accessed relatively quickly and inserted into the current frame of reference; permits and encourages the simultaneous, non-hierarchical participation of co-workers, using a common representation.
The drawing of partial solutions or representations also aids the designer’s thinking processes, and provides some ‘talk-back’. As well as drawing, innovative designers frequently like to undertake practical work related to the design solution, such as building models or mock-ups, or participating in construction.
The preliminary sketch
Among the best woodblock prints are many that seem not to have adhered strictly to the preliminary sketch. The sketch simply indicated a general direction, and in many cases was not used at all. Or it was even improved upon in the process of carving and brought vividly to life; the woodblock qualities of the print were accentuated and highlighted.
The computer creates a distance
Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space.
A mind so in flux
A mind so in flux, so sensitive to intuitive insights, could never write an academic textbook. All he could retain on paper were indications, hints, allusions, like the delicate color dots and line plays on his pictures.
Agents of thought and experiment
The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal.
Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore.
What you have observed closely
Drawing requires that you pay attention to every detail—even the seemingly unimportant ones. In creating an image (no matter how skillfully), the lines and tones on the paper provide ongoing feedback as to what you have observed closely and what you have not.
Anatomical Drawings of Staircase Spaces
A Book by Tomoyuki Tanakaminimator.app
An ApplicationMinimator is a minimalist graphical editor.
All drawings are made of lines in a grid based canvas. The lines are limited to vertical and horizontal lines, and quarter circles.
Right-Angle Doodling Machine
A Game by Clive Thompson- You draw one single line. It can be as long as you like.
- To start the line, you put your pen down.
- You can make right-angle turns only, either 90 degrees or -90 degrees.
- You cannot back up. You must always move forward.
- You don’t lift your pen until you’re ready to stop. When you lift the pen, the doodle is done.
A small store
A Gallery by Kyeoung Me LeeForget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand
An Article by Herbert LuiIn the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:
“Overnight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landor’s Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first week’s work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.”
Back to the Drawing Board
An Article by Nick JonesThe lost art of drawing for engineers and architects.
- You can almost tell which software they were designed in
- Conversational drawing
- The effort heuristic
- Tablets have caught up
Section-perspective drawing
A Fragment by Gerhard KallmannCouncil Chamber Study Looking South. Gerhard M. Kallmann.
Kallmann’s distinctive section-perspective drawing technique seen here allowed the simultaneous exploration of both interior spaces and building systems.
Pictures of Websites
An Article by Matthew StrömWhen I was a product designer, people would ask what I did for a living, and sometimes I’d answer “I draw pictures of websites.”
Sure, I could just say “I design websites.” That’s true. The end result of my work is (hopefully) that a website looks better, works better, or results in better outcomes.
But most of my day isn’t spent looking at the website, or working on the code of the website, or manipulating the website directly in some way. It’s spent in Figma or Sketch, drawing pictures of how I think the website should look and work.
Through some kind of alchemy, the pictures I draw have an impact on the finished website. But they’re not all the same.
Architectural tracings
A Gallery by Nick TrombleyA lightbulb is not an idea
An Article by Ralph AmmerWith conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.
When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.
Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.
And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.
The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.
All the buildings in New York (that I've drawn so far)
Invisible Cities
An evening identical to this
He feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.
Already memories
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
Like the lines of a hand
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.
The eye does not see
The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.
In every skyscraper
In every skyscraper there is someone going mad.
An invisible landscape
Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no farther. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock’s calcareous sky.
Unpossessed places
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Dead branches
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
The gods who live beneath names
Sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
The path
From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.
Falsehood
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
A model city
“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.”
“I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”
Their own absence
After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
Rearranged
Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors’ Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice’s former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants’ needs than it had been before.
In the image of their city
They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims. From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.
They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.
A city in the distance
If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes.
So that its destruction cannot begin
If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.”
An invisible thread
Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.
The inferno of the living
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.