Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice - Current Issue

This paper explores how non-design students can benefit from using visual methods as part of collaborative group processes in higher education. Based on an exploratory study, the paper analyses how analogue hand drawing in graphic facilitation combined with animation-based sketching can support humanities students in higher education to take on the role of designer. The empirical data is based on a course in a bachelor’s degree in communication and digital media in which students were tasked with designing an event for a museum. The students were not especially trained in using graphic facilitation or animation-based sketching methods as academic tools prior to this course. Thus, the educational approach incorporated two workshops in which the students were introduced to these visual methods and design approaches. Through visual examples, the students’ experiences are analysed in relation to their view on how these methods benefited or challenged their ways of working throughout the course. The paper ends by summarizing how visual methods can be considered relevant to academic practices beyond design courses.

By looking at ‘the dance of a drawing’, this paper questions the interest and limits of digital technologies in the world of drawing and, more broadly, the visual arts. Based on the system of Effort conceived by the movement theorist Rudolf Laban (1879–1956), the author proposes a new way of apprehending pictorial and graphic form, from its expressive movements. This approach leads the author to distinguish between two modes of graphic expression, the sensory and the rational, which are both opposed and complementary. By inviting the viewer to observe the dance of paintings by Van Gogh and Seurat on the one hand and children’s drawings on the other, the paper underlines how digital technology cannot completely replace traditional drawing techniques.

The findings of this paper relate to a recent body of drawings in my practice that owe its genealogy to the reproductive technologies of printmaking and photography. I relate these findings to my understanding of the ‘index’, borrowing from semiotics, as distinct from the symbol in which it establishes its meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to its referent, therefore bearing marks or traces, whose causal effects signify the object it refers to. This is further extended by both the explosion of digitality that came on the heels of the financial crisis of 2008 and forms of automatism that follow a set of investigative procedures to organize and govern practice but do not determine outcomes. Digitality, here, is either utilized as a visible element of artistic production or utilized as a symptom of the present, materialized as a trace. It flattens the physical axis of the trace into an immediate presence that collapses virtuality and materiality together on a known artefact such as paper.

This paper describes and analyses a drawing practice in a research project on corporeality and gesture, with a view to designing objects and spaces. This research, carried out at the École nationale supérieure d’art et de design de Nancy (France), questions our presence with things and others, the sharing of space and the world, by questioning the gestures that underpin them. Drawing is one of these gestures. Its pedagogical aims are pragmatic and practical: to question our physicality in artistic training and to provide prescriptive elements, i.e. methods and techniques of looking, reading, writing, designing and drawing. Turning away from knowledge that makes the body an object, such as ergonomics, the approach turns towards a knowledge of the self by the subject itself: somatics. The objective of the so-called somatic practices is to better understand and appreciate one’s own body experience in an aesthetic way. They are different from our habits, from our everyday connection to environments and propose to discover the variety of movements offered to our body when making movements. They propose a path towards body awareness that cannot be acquired through theoretical teaching, but only through the practice of movement. The role of the aesthetic appreciation of the body experience and the creativity of somatic practices and more generally of dance allows us to make the hypothesis that they are tools for design research the objective of which is precisely to consider the body in movement in order to conceive objects and spaces differently. To verify this hypothesis, we describe a creative protocol, followed by dance students and design students, which combines dance, drawing and furniture design. The drawing is in turn notation, imprint, sensitive recording, trace of movement, score, memory and quasi-object supporting a morphogenesis. Because it constantly revives movement, the objects resulting from the process are open to gestural and postural invention.

In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in the role of sketching in the fields of art, design and architecture, as well as education more generally. Sketching can play a unique role in promoting effective learning by helping to represent both concrete and abstract spatial relationships. This study aims to determine whether sketching is an advisable tool for expressing the results of human thinking in different situations of professional life, not only in art and design education but much more widely. The article uses an analytical examination of empirical material collected from eight interviews with experts to answer the following research questions: (1) is sketching an activity that can be classified as a mundane, methodical design-thinking technique? (2) Is sketching a hands-on exercise, necessary for a sense of freedom in the process of fixing thought, aimed at finding a creative solution in every new situation? and (3) should sketching be part of the educational process in all areas of teaching and science? The analytical findings offer a critical perspective and argue that sketching is a recommended and valuable tool for expressing the results of human creative thinking in different situations of professional life. The widespread impact of new digital technologies on the visualization of ideas compared to older, analogue visualization methods, as well as the increasing influence of artificial intelligence, creates a challenge to raise awareness of the need to use sketching in the educational process so that students can understand the role and importance of sketching in the creative and cognitive process as an essential tool for capturing thinking outcomes.