Rethinking the Way We Draw (in a digital reality)

Our entry will revolve around our curricular explorations to redefine drawing and drawing classes within our architectural department. When we started conceptualising new ideas to rethink our present design-drawing courses we acted from the notion that some of the basic concepts and skills within the practice of designerly drawing and its thinking processes are gradually eroding and how a different approach could respond to this notion. Introducing “digital drawing” within our practices and schools gradually has replaced some of the laborious activities within designerly drawing processes and the tool step by step earned a place as an indispensable tool for designing. While computers keep getting better at what they were designed for, our educational models, especially within the realm of drawing courses, have a hard time keeping pace as to adapt to this new reality. As digital activities took over a lot of our drawing procedures, we somehow ignored specific manually based movements and extensions that are somehow characteristic to design. After a period of gradual intrusion of digital drawing and modeling we are now are starting to look back in reverse in order to examine the gains and the losses of the whole digitalisation process and in order to redefine our models of education concerning (designerly) drawing and sketching. Within our unit we took some of the losses as a starting point to re-examine the status and learning processes of drawing within design. Our new approach searches for a self-evident equilibrium between manual and digital activities through a process-based approach. The backbone of the exercises is defined by a process-based, sequential gamesque structure where participants discover space through a process of modeling by and through drawing. Through integrating and layering different architectural drawing and modeling tools (i.e. projective drawing, digital drawing, sketching, graphic presentation, modeling, image editing) the game-process is used as a self evident tool which pushes the participants to switch and discover different media and modes of representation. Within the exercise we invite and initiate our participants to explore and embody personal paths within representing design. Through re-incorporating some of designerly drawing’s vanishing tools and techniques and combining them with digital novelties we hope to find a new place for drawing and explicit that drawing is a tool for designerly exploration and communication. Our paper will revolve around the things which shaped the courses and will illustrate the output of our first experiments within this new learning approach.status: publishe