Do we need a new theory of drawing? : exploration on technological change between physical and digital visualisation

This article proposes a framework for current use and future potential for drawing to present, represent, simulate and visualise the world within the education, industry, practice and research landscapes. Today’s metamodernism allows to reimagine this paper’s focus as an act of drawing, rejecting and redrawing together modernism and post-modernism to visualise solutions for complex matters of concern. Modernist technology, built on Monge’s orthographic projection, initiated computer-aided design and made possible to specify matters of fact and function that lacked ornament digitally. While postmodernists deconstructed modernity with the irony of acrobatic aesthetics and technology based on a renewed approach of “art for art’s sake”. Fittingly, current incremental innovations are bringing about new forms of connection, informed knowledge, involvement, narratives and storytelling that can help the reinterpretation and agency of drawing for this day and age. Particularly, these developments query whether a designer’s first-person observer-independent world view is enough to elicit ideation, conceptualisation and design. New product development teams are gradually becoming distributed globally and work in their own simulated virtual world environments. Their drawings structure simulations that can be tested digitally to save on material development and production, can be prototyped easily as material artefacts because new types of manufacturing, and increasingly, are becoming the end goal of design activity. Drawing principles are changing their application from the corner of two-dimensional emersion of individual ideas to the opposite of three-dimensional immersion into the design environment as embodied cognitive and enactivated experiences that express its participants’ interaction with real and simulated environments