digital sketching project

Context

This study attempts to bridge between the poetic world of fine art instruction and the analytical world of design research. While there are many books on how to draw with inspirational examples, they tend to build on the past rather than looking forward. Innovation in drawing is often studied by technologies who use tools like video or computers to dissect processes into small steps so that software can support these steps. The an alytical studies can make it hard to see the overall picture.

Because these specializations reflect different values, they don't often cross paths. The drawing books value the act of looking and direct interacting with paper and provide ideas on how to use technique to support art making or thinking. The research papers are looking to accurately describe or quantify the world so we can systematize methodologies. My goal is to use technology in service to design education.

The work comes from an interest in using mobile tools to understand places. It builds on the PlaceTools project to look at how mobile tools can be used by designers, supported by University of Oregon Educational Technology curriculum development funding. A paper describing this work can be found at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~design/nywc/pdf/caadria03-cheng.pdf.

Research Goals

In trying to discover what stroke-by-stroke replay can teach us about drawing, we came up with questions such as:

How does starting a drawing determine its outcome? Can seeing the steps that an expert follows speed up learning for a beginner? Can the digital pen reveal more about a person's thinking than traditional methods?

We began in Spring 2003 with the idea of collecting and analyzing different kinds of drawings that designers make, and then testing how we could use the digital files in teaching drawing. A grant proposal funded by the NorthWest Academic Computing Consortium (NWACC) documents the original concept for the project. Currently we are looking at what the pen can reveal about descriptive drawing techniques and ways to teach with digital drawings. Teaching with Digital Sketching" presented findings to the Design Communication Association in January 2004.