Siniša Kolarić, Ph.D.

Siniša is a researcher, IT expert and author focused on advancing design inquiry, practice and technology.

January 14, 2022

Sketches are the quintessential external representation for design. Sketching is an indispensable part of the process of designing itself as well.

For instance, Ullman, Wood, and Craig (1990) show “the necessity of drawing during all the developmental stages of a mechanical design”. Likewise, in architectural design, Schön and Wiggins (1992) state that “the designer sees what is there in some representation of a site, draws in relation to it, and sees what has been drawn, thereby informing further designing”.

Sketches are especially useful in the early, conceptual phases of design, when the design problem is still largely unknown (i.e., design requirements are usually still imprecise and incomplete). In other words, when the designer is trying to understand the design problem at hand. Sketches are especially suitable for this purpose because they are (Wilson, 2009):

  1. Quick,
  2. Timely,
  3. Inexpensive,
  4. Disposable,
  5. Plentiful,
  6. Suggestive,
  7. With minimal detail needed,
  8. With appropriate level of refinement, and
  9. Ambiguous.

Furthermore, the study by Black (1990) suggests that prolonging the use of sketches, due to their inherent ambiguity, contributes to a broader exploration of the design solution space.

With regard to CAD systems, sketches are graphic metaphors (Herbert, 1987) for both 1) the real artifact being designed, and 2) drafted digital CAD object. Therefore, they can be regarded as a bridge (or intermediary representation) between mental representations, and the CAD representation.

References

  • David G Ullman, Stephen Wood, and David Craig. The importance of drawing in the mechanical design process. Computers & graphics, 14(2):263–274, 1990.

  • Donald A Schön and Glenn Wiggins. Kinds of seeing and their functions in designing. Design studies, 13(2):135–156, 1992.

  • Chauncey Wilson. User Experience Re-Mastered: Your Guide to Getting the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann, 2009.

  • Alison Black. Visible planning on paper and on screen: The impact of working medium on decision-making by novice graphic designers. Behaviour & Information Technology, 9(4):283–296, 1990.

  • Daniel M Herbert. Study drawings in architectural design: Applications of CAD systems. In Proceedings of the 1987 workshop of the association for computer aided design in architecture (ACADIA), 1987.

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