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Read-write acts of drawing, or - the economy of treasure hunting: Gabriela
Goldschmidt
I write a text: a letter, a poem, a story, a scholarly paper. I read the text. I cross out a
redundant sentence. I replace a word with a more appropriate term. I add items to a
list. I highlight a phrase, and I make a note to myself to think of moving a paragraph to
elsewhere in the text. I also try to pick up spelling and grammar mistakes, and I ask
myself whether what I have written is coherent. Is it not too long? Is the style right? Did
I make my point? Will others see it as I do? Am I done, or should I return to my text
with a fresh eye tomorrow morning?
Sounds familiar? Of course it does. Who has not experienced such inner debates while
working on a writing task? We hardly ever 'get it right' the first time around. Experience
(and our school teacher) tells us that we had better first write a draft; we must then read
what we have written and revise our text before we are ready to sign it. In extreme
cases, this may turn out to be a lengthy, iterative process in which we produce many
revisions or many versions of the same text. Raymond Carver (1984) talked about the
many revisions his short stories always went through. Tolstoy was a notorious reviser
who disfigured proof sheets with endless changes and corrections, as is well evident
from the example in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Tolstoy's corrections of a galley proof sheet,
the novel Resurrection, 1889 Source: Crankshaw, E.
(1974). Tolstoy: The making of a novelist. New York:
The Viking Press.
Today we use word processing for many of the texts we
write. This makes writing easier: we have spell-
checkers, copy, cut and paste functions, and a thesaurus
to help in the production of a more polished text. For
some people the keyboard is faster than longhand. But
basically, writing remains the same activity: we still have
to compose our phrases as we go along, we continue to
not know in advance what exactly will emerge, and the
worries listed above are as present as ever, although we
recognize the supportive role of the computer. Is the
same true about reading texts? Do we use a computer to
read a text? Yes, if the text is short. Normally not, if the
text is of any length. Most certainly not, if the text is a
draft we are likely to revise. We print it out for the purpose of reading and annotating it
although technically, revising on the screen is easily achieved with today's word
processing facilities. Why is it easier to read paper texts than their screen equivalents?
Some of the reasons are physiological - the angle of the screen, the font size, or lighting
conditions - many such factors may present certain impediments. However, cognitive
factors are mainly responsible for our preference for paper texts. We can take sheets of
paper to wherever we are comfortable, place them at a distance and angle that suit us,
and most importantly, we can leaf through them with great ease, go back and forth
rapidly, or jump to another location in the text instantly. And, of course, they are easier
to annotate, and certainly to scribble over. For some of us tactile factors matter, too: the
touch of paper, the ability to crease or fold it, helps create an intimate bond between our
texts and ourselves: we like them used, rugged, stained, even.
Clearly, drafts are immensely important in the process of developing texts that we hope
to imbue with literary/artistic value. Reading the text is the only way to find out how well
we did. Reading is always an active, not a passive activity (Iser, 1978), but as opposed
to reading texts by others, where the perceived text - what we make of it - may differ
from what has been intended by the author, in a self-generated text such a gap cannot
subsist. When the text I read is my own, I use the draft and the act of revising it to
minimize any discrepancies between what is there and what I had intended. However, I
do not know in advance, at least not precisely, how the outcome ought to look, or
rather, how exactly it should read. I must continue to revise until it feels right; once I
have enough experience - I know when it feels right: the text talks back to me, it tells
me whether or not I have succeeded.
Therefore, there is no serious writing without active reading. Depending on the nature of
the text and on personal preferences, reading may occur at the very end, or at frequent
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intervals as one goes along. As to the number of times we go over the same fragment of
text - the sky (or a deadline) is the limit!
Writing is not unique in the practice of creation by revisions. Composers of music write
scores and revise them; they often play their music in order to in turn make changes in
the score. Hearing the music enhances the reading of the score. This is a composite act
since the notation on paper - the score - is not the 'ultimate' state of creation: the notes
represent something else, i.e. tones, unlike a text that represents itself only (unless it is
a play, for example). The musical score, however, is complete in and of itself: it does
not depend for its wholeness on the auditory production of the music it represents. The
same is true for other fields of composition, such as design.
The sketch
The designer does not normally construct or manufacture the entity he or she designs,
be it a building, a consumer product or a piece of machinery. The designer's principal
job is to create a satisfying representation of the entity that is being designed and the
most common representational medium is drawing. This is not surprising since we are
talking about objects with a physical reality, the description of which is best attained by
producing a likeness of them and their components so that we may understand how they
function, how they look, or how they affect their surroundings. However, designing an
object (or space, or system) is a process that takes time. It may be a while before the
designed entity takes a clear enough shape for the purpose of producing drawings that
represent it faithfully. At the outset the designer, or design team, often has only a vague
idea, if any, of what the designed entity will be like, not unlike the novelist or poet, or
the musician, who sets out to compose a story or a poem or a piece of music without
having a full vision of the finished work. The writer starts writing and shapes the text as
he or she goes along, by way of interacting with the draft. According to the testimony of
well-known novelists, even major character traits of heroes of novels are not necessarily
predetermined, and may be shaped 'on the fly'. The designer does something
analogous, using sketches instead of a draft. Ferguson (1992) identifies three kinds of
sketches: the thinking sketch which supports the designer's own thinking activity, the
talking sketch which is produced as a vehicle for communication in group discussions,
and the prescriptive sketch which specifies the designed object for the benefit of parties
that are not involved in designing it. The sketches we refer to here are the thinking and
the talking sketches, which we compare to the draft of a literary text.
Most designers start sketching long before the shapes and forms of the objects they
endeavor to conceptualize are determined. What they draw, then, are optional shapes
and forms that may be used, relationships among them, mechanisms that may be
relevant, reference material of all kinds drawn from memory or various types of
databases, and so on. They also draw abstract diagrams describing things like a
movement system through a building, an electric wiring layout, or a color scheme. The
sketch is also where constraints may be listed and illustrated, and various ideas that
come to mind in conjunction with the design task are recorded even if they seem, at first
sight, fairly remote from the problem at hand. The design sketch is an entirely free
drawing format, where the designer can leave depictions unfinished, where one is not
committed to scale, where the degree of detailing and precision may vary at will, and
where no consistency in the use of orthogonal projections is required. The designer is
free to use personal 'shortcuts' - any marks on paper will do, just as long as for the
designer they harbor some meaning. A single sheet of sketches may contain figurative
and non-figurative material, written notes, various symbols, calculations, etc. The
intimacy with one's own sketch allows sidetracking, random scribbling, and manipulation
of the paper: folding, even cutting it, which is one of the reasons computerized sketching
has not yet replaced the paper mode. The self-generated sketch is a design 'laboratory'
where one can try out anything that comes to mind: producing the sketch is very much
like writing a rough draft of a text, with even fewer constraints (e.g., no commitment to
grammar rules). Like the production of draft texts, prior to the computer the production
of sketches hinged on the availability of a suitable medium (i.e., readily available,
affordable, and in good currency) to sketch on and for 500 years this medium has been
paper (the industrial production of which was pioneered in Italy in the last quarter of the
15th century). A sketch by Leonardo da Vinci is reproduced in Figure 2: the affordances
it exemplifies, in terms of conducting a design search, have not changed much since his
time.
Figure 2. Leonardo da Vinci, study sketches for a
new Palazzo Medici in Florence, c. 1515. Source:
Pedretti, C. (1985). Leonardo, Architect. New York:
Rizzoli.
Figure 3 shows a design sketch by the contemporary
architect Harry Seidler. It contains a plan with
'footprints' of a few buildings; one of them is
repeated (twice) separately, and out of the general
context, at the top of the sketch. At the bottom we
see a schematic section, scribbled over with other
design elements, and on the right are some
calculations. The roughness of this sketch is
evidence of the circumstances of its generation: as
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yet little has been decided or settled; things are
fluid, scheme components are being considered and
checked out. How does the making of such a sketch
serve the process of designing the project in
question? The architect does not only draw, he also contemplates the sketch. It becomes
an instant visual display that contains a great deal of information, most of which is
intended - the architect has put it there purposefully - but some of which may not have
been intended. It is upon contemplating the sketch that the architect may discover it, or
pay attention to it for the first time, which makes it possible to react to it. The sketch
provides feedback: the designer reads information off it, using emerging configurations
as cues. Some researchers refer to new information that is read off self-generated
sketches and proves relevant as discoveries (Suwa et al., 1999), which they indeed may
sometimes be. Others (Akin & Lin, 1996) found that the more important decisions during
the preliminary design process are taken in instances in which the designer is engaged
in more than one mode of cognitive operation, one of them being drawing.
Figure 3. Architect Harry Seidler, design
sketch for the Riverside Center,
Brisbane, Australia, 1985. Source: Lacy,
B. (1991). 100 Contemporary architects:
Drawings & sketches. New York: Abrams.
Drawing a sketch, then, is comparable to
writing a draft text, and reading a text as
part of revising it is the counterpart of the
act of 'reading' a sketch. The two reading
acts, though, are not as closely related as
the acts of writing/sketching. We 'read'
the sketch continuously, as we produce it.
Unlike the reading of a text, which is
carried out during pauses in writing we
take for this end, the sketch 'talks back' to us even as we make it; in Schn's terms - it
breeds a conversation between the designer and his or her materials. The cues it
contains which, if picked up, guide further design moves, are not what we normally look
for in a written draft, where passages we write seldom take on the role of reference
material for immediate exploitation. Still, the sketch is the medium in which revisions are
made, quite like the draft. In Figure 3 we notice that some of the elements have been
drawn and redrawn several times, resulting in dark blots created by many overlapping
lines that are no longer recognizable as such. A technique used by many designers,
especially in architecture, to increase the efficacy of revising by sketching, is that of
layering sketches. Layers of thin tracing paper are placed one over the other and on
each the designer partially traces what is on the layer underneath, and partially
transforms/revises it. This mode of sketching facilitates the creation of series of
sketches of more or less the same design elements (series may, of course, be created
regardless of the type of paper used). Figure 4, an example from the work of architect
Mario Botta, depicts a series of 7 sketches in which he explored the arrangement of
bedrooms in a house whose round perimeter, central corridor and staircase had already
been decided on earlier. Series of sketches are not unlike versions of drafts: Tolstoy, for
example, is said to have revised/re-written War and Peace seven times.
Figure 4. Architect Mario Botta, design
sketches for the second floor of the Casa
Rotonda, Stabio (Ticino), Switzerland,
1980. Source: Botta, M. (1982). La casa
rotonda. Milan: L'Erba Voglio.
Treasure Hunting
We would now like to return to the cues
we have claimed the designer looks for in
sketches. We definitely restrict the
discourse to thinking sketches for this
purpose. Since design problems are
usually ill-defined, and ill-structured at
least to some degree, solving them
almost always depends on information
beyond that supplied with the problem
statement. The additional information
must be imported from external sources, and it is seldom clear ahead of time what those
sources might be. This, in fact, is the essence of the creative nature of designing: one
has to find appropriate information to reason with effectively, using unspecified sources.
Picasso allegedly said: "I do not search, I find." Did he really? We may safely assume
that if Picasso indeed 'found' such successful artistic solution (e.g., in his objets trouvs),
it is because he was constantly on the hunt; his search mechanism was always "on",
though in the background most of the time, unconsciously, for the most part. The
treasure hunting instinct may be a trait of particularly creative people; all designers,
however, possess it although it may not always be actively "on". When engaged in a
design search and in need for additional information to import into the design process,
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we actively search for it wherever it may possibly be found. de Bono (1967) tells a
charming story about the process he went through trying to design a medical implement,
in the course of which he went to a dime store to look at random articles, assuming that
he would see something that would trigger the necessary associations (which did indeed
occur). Designers, too, engage in such hunts; in some fields, such as fashion design,
there is a phase in which designers are formally required to present their 'sources of
inspiration.' The sources are almost exclusively visual images, but there is no knowing
where they might be found. The architect Denys Lasdun (1976) has noted: "In the
course of creation an architect may receive inspiration from a large number of sources
from works of the past and the present and from right outside architecture. He must
have something to work on (italics mine, G.G.); he is certainly no less creative if he
spreads his net wide and has an eye that remembers" (p. 107).
Now, where do designers go hunting for ideas, for sources of inspiration, for anything
that may, by a network of associations, help lead to a design solution? We may try dime
stores, as de Bono has done; we may spend days in libraries or surf the web until
something catches our eye and triggers an association. All of these venues may be
productive, but they are quite costly in terms of time and effort, as is always the case
when a search is random. We may restrict ourselves to domain specific libraries or web
sites, but that in turn shuts off opportunities for inter-domain fertilization. This is where
the sketch becomes instrumental: the designer makes marks on paper that add up to
rich configurations that may be interpreted in endless ways precisely because they are
marks on paper only, and not necessarily precise depictions of objects. Having been
made by the designer him or herself, all of those marks are in one way or another
related to things, concrete or abstract, with which the designer is familiar or to which he
or she has access to through notions stored in memory. The experienced designer uses
the sketching activity to generate configurations that may be read as cues to those not-
initially-accessible ideas, concepts or objects that could suggest a relevant lead to
solving the design problem.
Not-initially-accessible ideas - this is the key to understanding the role of sketching as
the production of potential cues: we conduct a search because ideas, even those whose
components are known to us, do not readily present themselves upon initiating a design
search - we must look for them. Any rich display may be helpful, but the self-generated
sketch wins over other possible displays because of its cognitive economical advantages.
It is very rapid and easy to produce; it is dynamic and flexible, it requires relatively little
effort because we recognize our own marks and can therefore use shortcuts. In addition,
the act of sketching focuses our attention on the issues of our design problem, thereby
allowing us to avoid the need to scrutinize much irrelevant material. We are trained to
look for treasures in the tangle of lines we put down on paper, and we know how to take
advantage of this invaluable skill. To this author, for one, it seems that to date, there is
no substitute to sketching as a design-thinking tool, one that economically and
effectively supports the generation, development, and revision of design proposals.
References
A kin, . & Lin, C. (1996). Design protocol data and novel design decisions, in Cross, N., Christiaans,
H. & Dorst, K. (eds.), Analysing design activity, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 35-64.
Carver, R. (1984). The Paris review interview. I n Fires. New York: V intage Books, 187-216
(Reprinted from the Paris Review).
de Bono, E. (1967/1971). The use of lateral thinking. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Ferguson, E.S. (1992). Engineering and the mind's eye. Cambridge, MA : MI T Press.
Goldschmidt, G. & Weil, M. (1998). Contents and structure in design reasoning. Design I ssues 14 (3),
85-100.
I ser, W. (1978). The act of reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lasdun, D. (1976). A language and a theme. London: RI BA Publications Ltd.
Suwa, M., Gero, J.S. & Purcell, T. (1999). Unexpected discoveries and S-inventions of design
requirements: A key to creative designs. I n Gero, J.S. & Maher, M-L. (eds.), Computational models of
creative design I V , Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, Sydney: University of Sidney.
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