Edinburgh Napier University

  While the title might suggest otherwise, this is not a polemic against CAD. The aim of this paper is to examine how the emphasis on drawing in design education has changed and the future implications in a digital world.

Drawing is unquestionably an important part of “designers’ cognitive processes” [1].

To quote Nick Talbot, of design group SeymourPowell, in his keynote speech at the Institute of Engineering Design Education Conference 2005, “Drawing = thinking and communication”

Twenty years ago, in the introduction to his book Presentation Techniques [2], Dick Powell talks of drawing as being one of the “forgotten subjects of design education”. Yet today the teaching of drawing as a design skill has been overlooked even more to make room for the necessary acquisition of new skills, like 3D CAD modelling.

That CAD is a valuable tool in the design process is without question, but before we enter the 3D CAD modelling stage, we sketch and doodle. It is part of the rapid cognitive mapping of design brainstorming and idea generation. “Without this skill,” says Powell, “too many designers are forced to design only what they can draw, rather than draw what they can design” [2]

The emergence of 3D CAD modelling as a presentation tool has rendered (no pun intended) the eponymous Presentation Techniques of Powell’s book obsolete, but the sketching principles described are still relevant to early stage visual cognition and will be for as long as we use pens and pencils.

The cognitive (thinking) visual (communication) process (hereon in referred to as design sketching) of design is becoming increasingly rare as a skill in design graduates,
and this is a problem that requires attention in academia.