Drawing and Doodling

Three posts on drawing and doodling

I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below.

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This week, something a little different.

I’m traveling this week—first I was home with family in Wisconsin, and now I’m in Indiana for the 7th Annual Symposium on HCI Education, or EduCHI. Lots of great papers here on pedagogical questions and innovations in the HCI and UX space—and all the proceedings are available on the ACM Digital Library open access!

Since I’m strapped for time this week, I thought I’d resurface a post I made earlier this year about the work I presented at this year’s EduCHI, which looks at student drawings of “design,” along with a couple others in the realm of drawing and doodling.

The paywall from these classic posts has been removed, so enjoy!

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First up, a post sharing the most interesting finding from my EduCHI paper, “Visual Representations of Human-Centered Design by Students in Computer and Information Science”: students’ pictorial metaphors for design. I was fascinated by the range and richness of these metaphors that students came up with unprompted. I asked them to draw/write their personal understanding of the design process as they experienced it in my class. Lakoff and Johnson, who wrote that metaphors structure human thought through and through, would not be surprised that many reached for metaphors to communicate their experience.

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Next up, what the work of Henri Matisse tells us about truth and fact.

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Finally, what can we learn from doodling? Here I share some learnings from Christopher Alexander (as I often do here) about the role of feeling in design.

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See you next week!