SKETCHING - CAN ENGINEERS AFFORD TO LOSE IT?
If we abandon sketching in the rush to fully automate / optimise our design practices what do we stand to gain or lose?
Young engineers often learn to sketch by osmosis; being in meetings, seeing more experienced engineers sketch concepts, details, and processes. These serendipitous learning experiences have been significantly reduced as a result of Covid isolation. This appraisal, illustrated with recent sketches and drawings from the engineering industry, responds to the following points:
• Skills - Young engineers benefit from being given time and stimulus to boost their skills, confidence, understanding and importantly, ways their sketching can be applied to problem solving (saving them masses of time over the space of a professional career, saving their employers money).
• Process - The act of sketching exercises cognitive and spatial skills, enabling the empathic mental link between drawing and building. Many engineers prefer to have freehand sketching options in addition to fully computerised visualisation modes; they enable privacy of thought and relief from the monotony of the screen.
• Cognition - When ideas occur to us we feel a build up of mental pressure, known as Cognitive Overload. By getting the idea on paper we employ a process known in neuroscience as Cognitive Offloading. We don’t waste valuable time polishing this visualisation up because we only half understand it, and may lose it if it isn’t captured instantly. The employment of sketching in this way expands the stamina of our working memory.
• Digital workflow - The talk will include images produced by young engineers who sketch rapidly ‘by hand’ by hacking digital drawing platforms. Their methods of ‘reaching in’ to the computer enable production of looser images that remain interoperable within the digital workflow.
Speaker
Trevor Flynn is Director of Drawing At Work. He developed the UCL Drawing Gym programme for engineers with a Teaching Innovations Award from University College London. He is a drawing instructor in several large architectural and engineering offices and at the IStructE.
