Old habits die hard; thankfully. I still always have to mind-map, word-associate, write and sketch before I get onto the screen. Sketching, writing and going back and forth with an idea in my note book, is more than a mere act of drawing or coming up with ideas, it’s actually a ‘dialectic process’, like having an intellectual dialogue with oneself and ‘partaking in a form of reasoning’ [Goldschmidt, 1991]. When we designers’ sketch ideas it’s not at all about the drawing. We bring onto that paper everything we are, the books we read, the movies we see, the conversations and life experiences we have had, our interests, beliefs and values. Hence the act of sketching becomes an important discourse, that which cannot be replaced, IMO.
This reminded me of what Michael Beirut had to say in his book ‘Now You See it and Other Essays on Design’; ‘The technology we have at our disposal is dazzling, and our efficiency is such that clients have come to expect fast solutions and near-instantaneous revisions and updates. Still, I wonder if we have not lost something in the process: the deliberation that comes with a slower pace, the attention to detail required when mistakes can’t be undone with the click of a mouse. Younger designers hear me talking this way react as if I am getting sentimental about the days when we all used to churn our own butter.’
My students look at me the same way when they hear all my stories of how we used to design and layout a full issue of a magazine 25 year back. [But they take me a bit more seriously when I can point out a .025” off-orientation line thanks to all the training my eye has received with all that manual cutting pasting]. But the real plus is that by going through that rigour, each step was thought out, each addition of a line or that extra colour or that change in font was given due consideration, as changing it would be a task and half. Each decision taken was mindful conscious and not hurried and mundane, but authentic and honest.
Are we losing that authenticity in design? Are softwares making our design more generic? Is the art of going back and forth with our thoughts and ideas lost on us? If so how can we as educators bring it back? If not, how has the scenario changed?
Goldschmidt,G. [1991] ‘The Dialectics of Sketching’
