RESEARCH GOALS DESCRIPTION

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.

Publications

Most recent paper:

For an the January 2004 conference held by the Design Communication Association, the paper http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~arch/digsketch/papers/NCheng_DCA04.pdf describes the project work to date.

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.

Procedure

On the one hand, we are collecting specific drawings from expert designers and artists and on the other hand, we are looking at how to use the pens in drawing classes.

Working with Experts

Expert subjects have been recruited from the architecture, landscape and art faculty and students, and from the local architects' organization. They are asked to perform drawing tasks such as drawing from a photo, drawing a room interior from life, diagramming a building and designing a simple structure within to suggested time guidelines. We then review the results with the authors.

Working with Students

We summarized the drawing techniques into lessons, culling expert drawings to illustrate specific techniques. For the initial sessions, we created a presentation explaining the pen technology and these drawing approaches (interior perspectives and annotated visual notes). We used them in one beginning session and two intermediate sessions during the summer of 2003, as a pilot project to determine the usefulness of electronic pens as a teaching tool.

After seeing the examples, the students used the digital pens to make their own drawings. The drawings were collected and reviewed as a group using the digital projector.

To stimulate interaction, students were shown several ways to start a drawing (construction lines, contour, tones, landmarks) during the lecture. After they created drawings, we asked them to look at the final result and guess how the drawings were started.