A sketching mentality —my greatest asset as a designer
There are many things I learned in my design education that I don’t use in my everyday worklife. I’m struggling to even give example of those things, probably because it was 7 years since I graduated and those unused skills are lost in memory. However, there is one skill I know I learned in school and I know I’d be half of the designer I am today without it. I am talking about sketching, or rather the mentality I developed when learning to sketch.
Me and my classmates all shared an awe and fascination for those that could really bring a product to life on paper. Knowing how to use all those copic markers, rocking the lighting table at 11 pm and framing it all with fast black ink and a signature — there was nothing that impressed us more. We all strived for that perfection as we started out with shelves, moved to stillebens of fruit baskets and peaked in our excitement somewhere between toasters and shoes. Towards the end of our program most of us had moved on to other interests and topics, more impressive, while I still dwelled there — taking extra classes in sketching at my home university in Luleå, but also abroad at the ID-program at Western Washington University.
I was intrigued by the skill, and I knew I probably wouldn’t master the craft later in my work life so I wanted to grasp the opportunity. Now, did I master it? Not sure. Did I sketch enough that it became my natural way of thinking and approaching a problem? Yes.
In my work as a designer at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden I design a lot of different things. Sketching for me is not just a tool to explore shape and form of a product — but a tool in visualizing ideas, interactions, project models, innovation processes, users, workshops, interfaces, systems — pretty much anything. Visualizing by sketching is absolutely my favorite way of communicating an idea. Along with learning to sketch — I picked up a few bonus-skills. I describe them below as Vulnerability, Super-speed and Immortality.
Vulnerability
First off, I learned that sketching requires quite a bit of bravery. Producing a beautiful sketch of a convincing product concept is a lot of work. There is a big dose of iteration, starting over and killing your darlings involved. Learning to think with your pen and not with your head is essential. To be a fast visualizer you have to be vulnerable and be able to present a sketch that isn’t perfect. Others will see it and immediately have an opinion. Your message will come across, or it wont. But to get forward, that sketch showing 5% of your talent is the first step. Being creative is daring to be vulnerable, unsure and out on the deep end.
Super-speed
I also learned that when you work with visualizing ideas it’s really helpful to think in levels of completeness. When drawing something you start with a vision of the whole thing, a sort of framework, that you then fill out more and more. First, you bring that whole thing to a 5%. You don’t bring part of a sketch to a 100%, run out of time and leave the rest at a 40%. That looks really awkward and I learned this the hard way. Everything needs to be brought to the same level, 5–10% at a time. With experience, you get really comfortable with working in different levels and you learn to embrace your 5% level — it’s fast and it does the job and it doesn’t take away from your 100% level.
This is a mentality that I apply in a lot of work tasks, for example in writing a project proposal. It’s a double-fold dependency; I can’t think without my visualizing, and I can’t visualize without thinking. So this makes it impossible to stall — if I can’t think of anything to write I’ll simply “sketch” something that I can work with. When there is an image or a framework to work from, the iterative process of bringing it to 100% is much easier. I’ve noticed this makes me a really fast producer in alot of areas, and I kind of feel like I’m wielding a secret powerful weapon.
Immortality
Finally, my sketching experience has taught me the value of feedback, and how to receive it. In one class we had to do a big amount of sketching every week and present the result on an A3 every Monday morning. I still remember sitting there, abnormal pulse and sweaty hands as classmates and teachers pointed out everything that was wrong with my specific drawing. They were nice, they were practiced in giving professional feedback and it was never personal, but always hard to receive. Until one day, it just wasn’t hard anymore — it was just part of everyone’s process to be shot down, get back up, and get better at what we did by starting over a lot of times. Learning to separate criticism of my work from criticism of me as a designer or human being was key. If designing was a computer game I was just given a bunch of extra lives.
To sum this ramble on sketching up, I am really happy I learned the art of illustration and for all the copic markers in my drawers I rarely use. But more than that, I’m grateful for the mentality I picked up on the way there and how fearless visualization feeds that unstoppable creative force within me.
