THEORY BY DESIGN
drawing
aesthetics
ambience
DRAWING AND DESIGNING
AS A RESEARCH APPROACH
TO RETHINK TEACHING
Schaeverbeke Robin
SINT LUCAS SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BELGIUM
Heylighen Ann
KU-LEUVEN DEPT. OF ARCHITECTURE, URBANISM AND PLANNING
Extending the Drawing?
‘Extended Drawing’ is a research project that investigates ‘generative media’ within design processes.
The term generative is used to refer to a medium or tool that can inform the course of a designer’s
thought process. Medium, following Marshall McLuhan, is considered as “any extension of the self”.1
In order to inquire possible new paths for teaching design-based drawing the project is searching for a
definition, status, value and practical use of design-based drawing within contemporary practice. Within the ‘Extended Drawing’ project we use the term design-based drawing as a generic term to denote
any kind of graphical activity rooted within a design activity. As such design-based drawing refers to
sketching, modelling and draughting – physically as well as digitally and as a means to explore and communicate design. The project inquires the building and strengthening of a practice through an active
combination of drawing, designing, research and teaching.
Over the last decades the digitalising of our design practices and schools has significantly changed our
approach towards and – views upon drawing. While Donald Schön’s view upon drawing as “a creative
conversation with the designer’s graphical material”2 still holds, a discrepancy is growing between ‘proven’ ways of instructing drawing essentials and convincing students to actively explore the medium’s possibilities. Several reasons lie at the base of this observation. There is the feud between physical and digital activities which has yielded an ill-defined relationship between both realms. Secondly there is a
maintained preoccupation with the observational combined with an ill-justified focus on dexterity,
technique and skill which hampers inquiries into the content material: exploring form and space. Last
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THEORY BY DESIGN
Extending the Drawing Classes,
Mapping a Context
1
Mapping the content of
the courses
1
but not least a new generation of learners has entered our schools, their changed attitude towards technology and the world out there forces us, teachers, to reconsider our proven ways of teaching and
learning.3
In 2010 the first author was asked to rethink the media courses for the entry-level architecture students
in his school. Up until then the media courses were divided between a digital and physical component
which were taught independent of each other.4 The concepts and intentions were easily mapped, finding
a practical format to deal with methods, assignments and content material proved to be a different matter (fig. 1). When the framing of possible working schemes did not seem to work we turned to designing
and drawing in order to explore possibilities to approach a basic course. The combined process of research, drawing and designing evolved into a series of ‘design experiments’: “design experiments as a
method to approach a problem from within the context of educational settings, with a focus on generalising from those settings to guide the process of designing courses. Design experiments fill a niche in the
array of experimental methods that is needed to improve educational practices.”5 As classroom situations tend to be messy, with many variables interfering with the outcome of an experiment, we introduced a series of ‘design experiments’ to explore a possible approach towards the teaching of designbased drawing within a school of architecture. The goal of this paper is to elaborate upon the motives
and design process of the teaching component of the ‘Extended Drawing’ project.
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“Designers do not draw for the sake of the effect they create, they are not artists in that sense. They
are making marks on paper, or in a computer, which represent something.” 6 Architects communicate
by means of drawings and representations. As H.G. Gadamer has pointed out: “representations and
drawings make the design present in the only way available to it”.7 These design-based drawings serve a
double function: communicating and exploring spatial thinking. As such design-based drawings can be
read both as a subjective trace of a thought process as well as an objective translation of that thought
process to communicate design. This duality lead Alberto Perez-Gómez to observe that “for architecture the difficulty of manifesting a symbolic order is necessarily double, since it concerns both the project and its ‘translation’–an unfolding that is seldom present in other arts since buildings possess experiential dimensions that cannot be reproduced in a conventional representation”.8 If we are to extend
the drawing classes for entry-level architecture students, we need to both address the teaching of craftspecific techniques while looking for ways to simultaneously call upon that craft in order to explore the
subjective, poetic aspect of form and space
Apart from this duality drawing serves specific roles within the design process. Designing could be read
as a series of interconnected steps with the aim of refining an object or a project. The process typically
moves from vague ideas to very specific definitions. This lead Vinod Goel (1995) to define the design
process as an evolution of different kinds of representations. Specific types of representation can be
matched with specific design-based tasks.9 While the activity of design-based drawing is intrinsically
connected to the process of designing, we had to acknowledge that learning how to draw form and space
relies upon non-negotiable geometrically based rules to represent the three dimensions. In order to extend the drawing classes for entry-level students we had to search for a replication of the concept of a
design process to structure the pedagogic learning curve to learn how to draw. Raising the craft-specific
techniques as the design process’ complexity increases. Extending the drawing classes meant fusing
concepts of design and learning how to draw into a process rather than a set of alienated techniques
Any contemporary design-based drawing curriculum has to confront the relationship between digital
and physical activities. The literature and debate upon this relationship has long been characterised by
the question whether CAD is a design or a draughting tool. The latter belief is rooted in Schön and Wiggins’ reading of the design process as seeing-moving-seeing – looking at a sketch can result in a new
sketch or in accessing different material from long-term memory which then produces a new sketch.
They link sketching to the formation of images that provide a starting point related to a possible physical
form and a way of developing that form.10 Based upon these ideas it was maintained that CAD was unable to generate form since it lacked the ambiguous and unconstrained qualities of a hand drawn sketch.
In other words it was too perfect as a representation to trigger interpretation. While Schön and Wiggins’
account still holds CAD is increasingly viewed as complementary tool within the design process.
‘‘Sketching about for ideas’, as Richard Coyne argues, suggests a sense-making activity that cannot tied
to any particular conceptual tool. Coyne argues that CAD is not just a narrowly defined technical drawing tool but a conceptual tool capable of developing new ways of perceiving and conceiving design. That
is CAD may foster new patterns, relationships, or aesthetics expanding, rather than reducing designers’
creative options. Within his research Coyne found that inexperience in computing rather than the medium itself seemed to be the limiting factor to explore design possibilities.11 To extend the entry-level
drawing classes we had to start looking for a collaborative approach, combining physical and digital
drawing activities. Extending the drawing by refining an artefact through studying its appearance from
different angles and points of view, using different tools as such discovering a tool’s inherent qualities.
These issues provided a basic theoretical framework to start thinking about extending both the drawing
and the drawing classes for the entry-level architecture students. Mixing media and exploring strategies
to compile modes of drawing became the guiding principle to structure a pedagogic model. We stipulated that our core activity would revolve around teaching entry-level students to “externalise spatial
thinking”. By doing so we changed the subject matter from drawing to, what Ben Jonson refers to as,
‘design ideation’. ‘Design ideation’, in his view, is a matter of generating, developing and communicat-
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ing ideas – as “a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete or abstract”.12 Based upon
the above our aim was to design and develop a course which invites its participants to inquire and explore the extending of the drawing rather than practice an alienated skill.
2
Exploring a basic
scheme through
drawing
3
Modelling 14mm
THEORY BY DESIGN
drawing. The constraints had to be open enough to allow for creative interpretations but at the same
time (structural) complexity had to be limited to be able to express the structure by drawing it by hand.
It was stipulated that the introductory process (14mm) introduces basic orthogonal drawing, perspective
drawing and modelling techniques (physical modelling, basic 3D-modelling) and gradually moves towards an integrated poster presentation. (fig. 3) Its follow up (24mm) introduces angular modelling,
free-form or organic modelling and the development of an imaginary context through virtual landscaping. The aim of 24mm is to communicate a modelling process of three different structures within a
landscape. The output includes several sets of explorative drawings, a booklet reflecting upon the process and a poster as a synthesis of the process. (fig. 4)
5
Modelling structures
within 14mm and 24mm
4
24mm basic modelling
process
Designing a Process, Drawing the Process
‘Process’, within the above, refers to the series of assignments we developed to in(tro)duce drawing.
In searching for a replication of the process-based nature of design-based drawing we looked for a model of instruction which coupled ‘learning how to draw’ with ‘generating form and space’. A first step was
to introduce the concept of the game as a metaphor for design, approaching design as a playful set of instructions, comprehensible by chance. The idea was that the game metaphor would be able to avoid
conscious reasoning about the motives for design and allow us, the drawing teachers, to refer to a tangible object of design to guide the introduction of drawing techniques. The exercises were developed by
designing and drawing consecutive series of assignments. The process of designing and drawing provided the project with a first-hand experience and inside knowledge about the specifics of executing these
assignments. Research became designing, designing became drawing and the combined activity of
drawing and designing informed both the teaching and the research. (fig. 2) After a private test-run we
introduced the processes to four groups of students with two different drawing teachers. Our target and
test audience consisted of entry-level students, most of them stopped drawing around the age of twelve.
The experience of drawing and teaching the assignments, combined with reflections with colleagues and
informal talks with the students nourished the teaching component of the ‘Extended Drawing’ project.
Henceforth we will refer to 14mm as the introductory process and 24mm as its follow up. The series of
assignments aims to offer a framework to enable someone to draw and visualise an architectural project
– from scratch. The game revolves around a loose set of constraints to discover form, space and place
through an improvised process of building a model. Imagining and developing form becomes a motive
for drawing and through drawing one discovers form and space. What follows is based upon two completed series of both processes which were evaluated both as research as well as learning material.13
Both processes start from the characteristics of the cube as a basic building block. The geometry of the
cube, being equal in three dimensions, provides a comprehensible format to explain and explore perspective theory.14 Starting from its qualities as a learning vehicle we started drawing out stacking varieties
in order to investigate the extending of the cube as a modelling unit. This led to defining consecutive
constraints able to shift the cubes in such a way that they become a model for a building and thus, for
2
Evaluating the Process
Both processes (14mm, 24mm) connect design-based assignments and drawing techniques to serve a
clear goal: developing a personal architectural structure through the combined process of drawing and
designing. As such the processes shifted focus from drawing as a recording to drawing in order to invent.
Both processes transcended perspective theory and used the theory in order to develop an architectural
structure. Suddenly a hint of creativity entered the drawing classes and by doing so the students’ drawings suddenly were allowed a certain poetic freedom within the image making. The processes extended
the mathematics of drawing by adding to it a notion of form giving and discovery. As such both processes invite the students to inquire the medium of drawing by getting involved in a personal design process
as opposed to limiting the courses to a set of alienated drawing instructions.
The decision to collaborate between the digital and the physical drawing classes enabled us to share and
exchange similar learning material. The collaboration opened up opportunities to illustrate similarities
and differences which provoked reflection upon the instrumentality of both drawing activities. The students are challenged to extend the drawing through a combined learning process, through flipping between drawing by hand and digital modelling, printing and rendering. The assignments avoid prescribing a preferred medium to approach the image and invite to discover, develop and express a preference,
a strategy or a working combination in order to visualise design. As such the drawing is extended by
adding to the embodiment of skill, the discovery of creative knowledge through the process of learning
how to draw. For the teachers the exchange of output between the digital and physical drawing classes
allows assessment of a student’s progress within representing design as opposed to narrowing the output
4
5
3
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down to a digital or physical profile. By combining the digital with the physical the processes extend the
drawing from being an instrument for production to being a source of discovery and experimentation
between digital and physical opportunities and possibilities. (fig. 5)
The real discovery within the processes lies within its ascending series of assignments to develop form.
Moving from vague to specific with the intent of looking for solutions through drawing and processing.
Both processes work towards a synthesis, towards a closure of a creative process. 14mm replicates a
sketching process through learning how to draw form and space and works towards a final ‘sketchy’
presentation of an abstracted space. 24mm replicates a more thorough design process which is concluded by streamlining the output and preparing the output for publication. As the development of formal
and spatial quality is directly linked to the drawing skills at that particular point within the learning process both processes proved to be able to set flagpoles for evaluation. None of the teachers taught design,
only corrected deviations from the constraints the process holds. As such aspects of design were already
accounted for during the contact hours, leaving maximum attention to guide the drawings and what
they express. When comparing the teaching output to those of previous years, before the design experiments conducted triggered by the ‘Extended Drawing’, the teachers involved indicated a significant rise
of the average level of the students. Our experience led us to believe that due to the development of a
personal story with regard to the spatial structure the final output of the processes revealed a more consistent result with regard to both content and drawing skills. Building an architectural structure from a
set of cubes as opposed to learning to draw from alienated, abstract cubes and functional objects seems
to enable the students to relate to and explore a certain spatial complexity.
The teaching approach was able to turn the focus around from perception to invention. While this redirection was a clear goal of the ‘Extended Drawing’ project it also revealed that certain knowledge tends
to get obscured. Our model of instruction through applying rules and shortcuts ignores the notion of
looking to the world for inspiration. By drawing trees, flowers, houses, details one is able to internalise
certain spatial relationships, formal qualities which become part of one’s personal vocabulary. Trying to
develop possibilities where perception and analysis informs invention and design could help to integrate
this aspect into the processes. Another pressing issue is which aspects of our pedagogical tradition towards drawing needs to be maintained in order to teach and learn basic skills within drawing and representation. Especially within 24mm we need to inquire how to deal with specific skills such as cylindrical
geometry and complex geometrical shapes such that it adds to the process. The final evaluation of the
second run of 24mm revealed that the modelling of non-orthogonal forms somehow failed to introduce
drawing approaches towards non-orthogonal shapes. The output did not reveal an augmented or embodied contextualisation or complexity, within the structures and landscapes, nor by design nor by
drawing. We need to search for relevant constraints to extend both media and form. (fig. 6)
6
24mm manufactured
mountainscapes
THEORY BY DESIGN
Extended Research on Drawing
and Drawing Research
7
24mm designing and
developing three
different designs
8
24mm publishing
design-based processes
within an A5 booklet
The implementation of research issues in a real-life classroom situation has its merits: the research
serves a very direct and practical goal, one receives immediate feedback from a critical group (i.e. students and colleagues) and one is able to test a hypothesis upon a larger group. By executing the processes and studying ways to explain or explicit the skills involved we are able to refine practice-based knowledge upon the subject matter. Our renewed approach not only teaches the students how to draw but in a
way re-informs us, teachers, how to approach (the teaching of) drawing as well. Working out the assignments and processes reveals a hidden ‘tacit’ dimension (to use Polanyi’s term)15, disclosing specific issues and techniques providing a practice-based reference, making it easier to explain. Developing, designing and executing (parts of) the process forces the teachers to (re)consider what it is we do when we
are doing it.
Working on the ‘Extended Drawing’ project revealed a discrepancy between reading and writing about
drawing and the practicalities of instructing drawing. Drawing is a ‘hands-on’ skill which must be embodied and refined through ‘doing’. As the research project investigates the relationship and basics of
design-based media within an entry-level architecture program, we are obliged to redefine and re-approach those basics beyond the descriptive. By drawing out the series of assignements ourselves we have
put ourselves somewhere in the middle of the participating parties involved. As such the literature review provides a theoretical framework which is then practically tested to see whether the framework
works through designing and drawing. The process of drawing adds a first order level of experience to
the research enabling us to refine both technique and content of our design experiments. This approach
enables us to expand or deepen certain concepts by looking more closely into the consequences or backgrounds of certain positions. The combination of reading, writing, drawing, teaching and reflection is
gradually building a new kind of practice, an embedded research practice with a clear dedication to inquire change in a developing area. Implementing the project in a real-life situation enables us to test and
interact with the researched material in ways that theoretically based research would not be able to. (fig.
7,8)
7
6
8
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Notes
1
McLuhan M., (1964-2002) Understanding
Media/ Media Begrijpen, Gingko press/Uitgeverij
Nieuwezijds
2
Schön D. (1983), The Reflective Practitioner,
Temple Smith
3
Prensky (2001) calls them ‘digital natives’ in
Prensky M., ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants
in On the Horizon, MCB University Press, Vol. 9
No 5, October 2001 , Nimon talks about
generation Y in Nimon S. (2007) ‘Generation Y
and higher education: the other Y2K? In Journal
of Institutional Research in Autralasia, 13(1), 24-41
4
The media courses introduce design-based
presentation and representation techniques:
freehand drawing, CAD, image editing and
publishing.
5
Collins A., Joseph D., Bielaczyc K., (2004)
“Design Research: Theoretical and Methodological Issues” in THE JOURNAL OF THE
LEARNING SCIENCES, 13(1), 15–42
6
B Lawson, What Designers Know (2004, Elsevier
Ltd.)
7
Gadamer H.G. cited in Vasely D., (2004)
“Architecture in the age of divided representation”
MIT press London-Massachusetts
8
Perez-Gomez A., Pelletier L., (1997)
Architectural Representation and the Perspective
Hinge, MIT press London-Massachusetts
9
Goel V., (1995 ) ‘Sketches of THought’, MIT
Press
10
Schön D., Wiggins, (1992) ‘kinds of seeing and
their function in designing’ Design Studies Vol 13,
pp135-156
11
Coyne R., Park H., Wiszniewski D., (2002)
Design devices: digital drawing and the persuit of
difference, Design Studies 23, 263-286
12
Jonson B., (2005) Design ideation: the
conceptual sketch in the digital age, Design
Studies 26, 613–624
13
The first run of 14mm involved two teachers
mainly teaching manual drawing techniques by
testing the game as a teching framework. The
digital realm was introduced in the second run of
the exercise. 24mm was tested with three
different teachers. All teachers focussed on an
aspect of one of the techniques to be introduced
by using the game’s modelling process as content
material. As we write we are able to evaluate two
completed runs of both exercises. For a more
elaborated account upon the exercises and their
development we refer to Schaeverbeke R. (2012),
Re-approaching teaching processes within
design-based drawing using improvised
game-processes, Tracey
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sota/
tracey/journal/edu/schaeverbeke.html
14
15
THEORY BY DESIGN
see Ching FDK 1943-1998, Design Drawing, Van
Nostrand Reinhold; Eijssen K and Steur R 2007,
Sketching, BIS; Henmi R and Fraser I 1994,
Envisioning Architecture (An Analyses of
Drawing), John Wiley and Sons;
Polanyi M., (1983) ‘The Tacit Dimension’, Peter
Smith Publishers, London
drawing
aesthetics
ambience
DRAWING AND DESIGN
AS METHODOLOGICAL TOOLS
IN THE TEACHING
OF HISTORY OF
ARCHITECTURE
Petridou Vassiliki
UNIVERSITY OF PATRAS, DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE ENGINEERING,
GREECE
Pangalos Panayotis
UNIVERSITY OF PATRAS, DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE ENGINEERING,
GREECE
“Quand on voyage et qu’on est praticien des choses visuelles, architecture, peinture ou sculpture, on regarde
avec ses yeux et on dessine afin de pousser à l’intérieur, dans sa propre histoire, ses choses vues. Une fois les
choses entrées par le travail du crayon, elles sont inscrites. Dessiner soi-même, suivre des profils, occuper des
surfaces, reconnaitre des volumes, etc., c’est d’abord regarder. C’est être apte peut-être a observer, apte à découvrir […] ; à ce moment-la le phénomène inventif peut survenir. On invente et même on crée.”
LE CORBUSIER1
Architectural drawings constitute a starting point with two chronic dimensions: the projection of an alternate not realized but yet potential future and at the same time the projection of the thinking from
which the lines and scars on the surface were born. It is therefore, the basic tool with which architects
transmit and elaborate their thinking, but also an essential element in understanding the architectural
design process.
However, the use of the drawing takes up an additional important part in the architect’s perception,
since it may constitute a study tool on existing objects, pictures or relationships. Therefore, the architectural drawing is not only a communicative tool, but as a method of morphological reproduction, it
contributes in expanding the architectural ideas. It is a procedure, parallel to the intellectual one,
through which we can control and present our choices, since via representation, our relationship to the
represented object is stated, that is our knowledge and the speculation regarding its essence.
Each project, since the moment it is re-designed, is constituted as an object of study and thorough examination. Representation is an interactive process: I draw, I think, I draw. Therefore, we claim that
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