Interactivity, Game Creation, Design, Learning, and Innovation : 6th International Conference, ArtsIT 2017, and Second International Conference, DLI 2017, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, October 30–31, 2017, Proceedings, 2018

The literature on design research emphasizes working in iterative cycles that investigate and explore many ideas and alternative designs. However, these cycles are seldom applied or documented in educational research papers. In this paper, we illustrate the development process of a video sketching model, where we explore the relation between the educational research design team, their sketching and video sketching activities. The results show how sketching can be done in different modes and how it supports thinking, communication, reflection and distributed cognition in design teams when developing educational theories.

This design research examines my personal process of sketching and image-making as an aid to learning. The goal is to show—both within the process and the narrative that is created— how I used image-making as a learning tool during graduate school. The professional and academic world is demanding more of us all and topping that list of demands is innovation and creativity. At the same time, the educational system is being criticized for actually doing the opposite—killing creativity. Having been a recipient of killed creativity, the question “how does one find one’s creative self?”is of great importance to me, particularly since I am a creative professional. My entering graduate school was initiated by my search for the answer to this question. Upon entering graduate school, I came to believe that my training and experience as a graphic designer and illustrator positively influenced my approach to learning. I believed that my sketching process was the root of this influence. I began this thesis with the question “How does one find their creative self?” During my initial research I found that the dialectic process of sketching was playing an integral role in finding my creative voice and had become an important learning tool for me during graduate school. This realization therefore shifted my research towards a self-study of my personal use of sketching, looking at the questions: why do I sketch? what does it provide me? and how does it assist my creative thinking and problem solving? My background as a designer influenced my decision to use a design methodology which is an interdisciplinary paradigm that reflects elements of arts-informed, heuristic, phenomenology, and action research. The graphic narrative provides a medium that combines the power of both verbal and visual. The word/picture interdependent combination “where words and pictures go hand in hand ... convey an idea that neither could convey alone” (McCloud, 1993, p.155). My method for self-inquiry and dialogue was to create five graphic narratives, each about the creation of an image that I did during my time in graduate school or influenced my thinking during graduate school. Following each of these five stories is a “back story” which documents the process of creating the graphic narrative. I found that the process of sketching offered a number of benefits • an expansion of my problem space, a place to think, expand my thoughts and find new ideas; • a place to put my ideas and consider them as communication, to evaluate the message and contemplate the audience and their reactions to the message; • a place to self-reflect where I could re-vision and re-evaluate past memories; • an aid for memory but more importantly a place to create memories; • a place to create that provided intrinsic motivation and ultimately made me happy; • a place where I could dress ideas in different clothes and look again with different eyes. Sketching was my tool for thinking and understanding but also enabled a place for me to be creative. I am not an anomaly, therefore the question that then follows is “how can others learn about and use this tool?”

2017

This thesis explores drawing education in product design education. Focusing on sketching as an indeterminate and questioning practice it is argued that drawing education must extend beyond skill training and offer learning situations in which sketching's dialogic potential is active as reflection-in-action. While the need for conventional drawing skills is acknowledged, purely instrumental definitions of practice and education, in general, are critiqued. An integrated educational project explores how and why we might extend design drawing education beyond skill training to encourage explorative and dialogic learning, drawing as learning; as noticing, communicating and refining sensitivities. An inquiry into lines as they relate to drawing and learning comes to function as a metaphor throughout the thesis. The decisive straight (learning) line is contrasted with lines that hesitate, deviate and meander. It is suggested that learning situations that create space for, and value, the indeterminate and dialogic potential of sketching help to produce learning experiences that encourage some relevant and abiding attitudes essencial to most design practices.

2003

Prescriptive models of design often consider designing to be an objective process. We show, in a study requiring two groups of student designers to produce a 10 minute film from their riginal two and half hour design process, how this is far from the truth. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis we suggest that accounts of designing, while focusing on key events, are determined by how those events fit (or can be made to fit) a particular story narrative. It follows, then, that the prescriptive model is simply one story about designing. We describe the VALiD methodology, a tool for detailed reflection on designing, and speculate that it could be useful in professional design contexts.

In design, sketching is a thinking tool next to writing, and sketches are often referred to as the language of designers. The ability to sketch out ideas rapidly in various formats is a central skill for a designer, and should be fostered in educational programmes. For most students, however, sketching skills seems far less developed than writing, and as a result, they often avoid communicating visually all together. This paper concerns the use of sketchnotes as a means to train basic visual communication and drawing skills. It presents a practical experiment with 55 students from IT product development at a computer science faculty who were involved in lectures, critique and open sketchnote assignments as part of their course in shape changing interfaces. The paper discusses insights related to how the different activities contributed to improving the students' skills in making knowledge visual and engaging others with their drawings. The paper discusses outcomes related to the visual qualities such as the use of various types of contrasts and to the informational quality such as the level of abstraction in the drawings comprising a sketchnote. Finally, the paper relates these outcomes to the students' journey towards becoming more confident sketchers.

International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2000

Previous research by one of the authors showed that novice designers do not use sketching as a way to generate, develop and communicate design proposals, but move immediately to three-dimensional modelling. Neither do they generate multiple solutions.

To Be or Not to Be a Great Educator

Sketching is one of the key activities that characterise the process of visualising ideas in the creation of design products and artworks. Sketching skills are necessary to record observations. In addition, sketching can be used to capture new information. In the new State basic education standard of Latvia, sketching has a noticeable place in both design and technologies and art. The study aimed to investigate the role of sketching in the general education of students – future teachers of primary school education, future design and technologies teachers, and future designers. A survey (n = 126) was used to achieve the aim. The results show that sketching is to a greater extent and more diversely taught in visual arts than in home economics and technologies. Almost a fifth of the respondents (19%) did not learn sketching in visual arts, and almost half (48%) – in home economics and technologies. Most respondents consider that a sketch is a rough idea for a work, a draft of a work, a...

2020

This paper reports on the relation between sketching, visual facilitation and design processes when master students develop digital learning designs. The paper builds on a previous study that investigated students' use of selfproduced visualisations during the design process. Although the study did not deal with visualisation, and students were not trained to draw, the participants made extensive but unacknowledged use of visualisations. In the present study, a new group of students from the same master programme were taught how to draw as a central component of the design process in order to investigate how this might expand their use of visual facilitation and sketching to drive collaborative processes, design decisions and theoretical reflections. As design practices enter new interdisciplinary domains, in this case digital learning design, the aim was to explore how humanities students can act as designers by adapting different design approaches and visual methods in particular. The empirical data, including teaching observations, students' visual productions and interviews with 27 students from nine groups after completing the course, were drawn primarily from an explorative case study in which masters students developed digital learning designs to solve a problem framed by an external stakeholder. Students' ways of producing visualisations in the different phases of their design process were analysed in terms of four design genres (explorative, investigative, explanatory and persuasive). This sociomaterial analysis traced how drawings and drawing activities unfolded during collaborative group processes. The findings confirm the potential of drawings as a means of developing ideas, collaborating in different design phases and presenting and discussing design ideas with target groups and external stakeholders. Furthermore, findings revealed that drawing activities became a significant pedagogical consideration in the students' digital learning design and data collection, but also that the students lack an academic terminology for articulating these processes.

In design studio, sketching or visual thinking is part of processes that assist students to achieve final design solutions. At QUT's First and Third Year industrial design studio classes we engage in a variety of teaching pedagogies from which we identify 'Concept Bombs' as an instrumental in the development of students' visual thinking and reflective design process, and also as a vehicle to foster positive student engagement. Our 'formula': Concept Bombs are 20 minute design tasks focusing on rapid development of initial concept designs and free-hand sketching. Our experience and surveys tell us that students value intensive studio activities especially when combined with timely assessment and feedback. While conventional longer-duration design projects are essential for allowing students to engage with the full depth and complexity of the design process, short and intensive design activities introduce variety to the learning experience and enhance student engagement. This paper presents a comparative analysis of First and Third Year students' Concept Bomb sketches to describe the types of design knowledge embedded in them, a discussion of limitations and opportunities of this pedagogical technique, as well as considerations for future development of studio based tasks of this kind as design pedagogies in the midst of current university education trends.

Revisiting how and why sketching delivers in the first section of this paper, we discuss how sketching supports the reactive mode of thinking and fits well with the design process. We then move on to the reasons and the potentials of sketching contributing to proactive mode of thinking, where designer react to his own sketches, thus leading to new thinking directions and more new sketches. The paper shows why, Designer reacting to his own sketched-­‐world can potentially lead to his movement towards being proactive. In the second section, we focus on designer's strange sketching behavior, which, on the face of it, appears to defy logic. Designers don't seem to wait till they understand the problem fully. They make a beginning and get into the act of sketching and use it to understand the design problem! We also looked at how they seem to search for solution through rather aimless activity like doodling and why it actually works. Designer's unusual approach is based on operative words and phrases like 'open mind'; 'innocence'; 'unrestrained optimism' and ability to keep the problem at the 'back of the mind', attributes that are naturally associated with art. Some of these practices appear strange and irrational to other disciplines, but in creative design and in art, these are not unusual. It is