Why sketch?

Most people see sketching as a kind of drawing. Not as informal and stream-of-consciousness as doodling, nor as refined as a finished drawing, sketching is a way to work though ideas. It’s a process of exploration and a way to transform a rough notion into something clearly visible to oneself and to others. It allows us to reify concepts so they can be seen, evaluated, and used as the basis for creative decisions.

Nearly everyone is familiar with the idea of sketching. We all know that the car we drive, the building we are sitting in, and the sculpture in the city square probably all started life as a drawing. It’s safe to say that most people have an intuitive understanding of the purpose of sketching and its place in the creative process.

This is because many artistic and design disciplines have well understood sketch languages that underpin the working process. Painting, sculpture, product design, interior design, filmmaking, and architecture all operate with well-defined sketching processes built into their creative decision-making. In each of these disciplines, sketching (and sketches) forms an essential part of the journey from rough idea to finished work. Everyone involved in the process, and even people outside the process, understands the language of the sketch and understands how the sketching process helps to generate better thinking and better outcomes at the end. When people look at a sketch, they know intuitively that they are looking at a sketch and expectations are set accordingly. No one expects more of the sketch than it can deliver.

Sketching is a powerful tool in these situations because it is both a process of thinking and also a way of communicating ideas. It tends to be fast. It can be used to both generate and refine ideas. And when used properly, everyone involved becomes a creative collaborator helping to build a better solution in the end.

But if sketching is such a good way to explore ideas and quickly and efficiently refine thinking, why is it almost the exclusive domain of specific art and design disciplines? There are some design disciplines, such as digital media design, that don’t have a well-defined sketch language. Why is this? And why isn’t sketching more widely understood and used by business managers tackling complex communication, process, and structural problems?

The problem lies with the close association that sketching has with drawing. Although this association is relevant in some cases, creative problems that aren’t naturally resolved or aided through drawing tend not to use sketching as part of the process.

The reason for this is simple: people see sketching as a kind of drawing, not a kind of thinking. If instead we regarded sketching as a kind of thinking then we would possibly see more ways to employ the power of sketching to generate solutions to other kinds of creative problems. Sketching can take many more forms than just drawing.

Now there’s no doubt that drawing is a great way to sketch, and if more people developed the skills and confidence to draw as part of the way they engage with the world, their ability to solve problems and create better solutions would be improved. But the thing that often stands in the way of sketching is not drawing skill – it’s the computer. The computer tricks us into thinking we are sketching, when in actual fact our minds are engaged in the process of using the computer, not articulating the idea.

You can see this played out in some design disciplines. For example, most digital media designers rarely pick up a pencil at any stage in the process. Although there are lots of websites out there that are fantastic experiences and a pleasure to use, there are many, many more which are counter-intuitive expressions of utterly thoughtless design. Graphic designers too tend to draw less and less these days as a part of their process. And where drawing is used, it is often not of a sufficient level of detail and information to be a helpful addition to the process of making decisions.

The reason for this is the tools of the trade. The entire creative process of digital media designers and graphic designers is carried out using the computer. The problem here is that even if a designer thinks he or she is sketching, the second they open up Photoshop or Illustrator they are automatically engaged in the process of making a finished product. The tool leans so heavily in the direction of the finished item that it is impossible for a designer to resist the pleasurable temptation to fiddle with details before the basic idea is even worked out. The rush to the finished product means that ideas remain unexplored and decisions about finishing details wind up being made at the start of the process instead of at the end.

This same problem undermines the creative thinking of business leaders and managers too. People in business are constantly being asked to generate ideas and solutions to complex problems, but because they lack a well understood sketch language, the tendency is to use the most obvious tool – the computer – and do all the thinking there.

Let’s take planning for instance. Planning a complex project should ideally be a sculptural exercise in shaping the right sequence of activity to achieve a goal. Instead it quickly turns into a process of filling in lines on a spreadsheet in Excel or MS Project. In the absence of a sketching process, the tool takes over and all the thinking directed at filling in the spreadsheet, not in solving the challenges of sequencing, interdependencies, and prioritisation. Making a beautiful plan document becomes the aim while the value of the planning conversation via a robust sketching process gets forgotten.

The same holds true for presentations. Everyone in business these days is required at times to communicate complex ideas in a simple and memorable way. Yet, in spite of this creatively challenging brief, sketching as a way to work out what is important and what needs to be said is absent from the process. People jump into PowerPoint before they have even figured out what they want to say. Time is wasted in the beginning on selecting fonts, colours, and bullet styles. Ideas that have no value end up surviving in the final version simply because the author spent significant amounts of energy choosing clip art. And as a result of the absence of a sketching process, people in business routinely suffer the consequences of poorly constructed stories delivered in PowerPoint.

Introducing a sketching moment in the process of creating plans, presentations, structures, technical architectures, business models, etc would force a different mode of thinking in the early part of the process when it is most critical. Sketching should be part of everyone’s skill set in any line of work that requires the ability to solve complex problems where different emotional and logical criteria need to be addressed.

Developing a sketch habit in the early stages of the creation of an idea requires four things to be successful:

• Speed of execution – The sketching process needs to accelerate the generation and refinement of ideas, not slow them down. Tools and techniques need to be lightweight, easy to use, and not dependent on technology or complex operations.

• Clarity that it is a sketch – The tools that are used should not be the same tools to develop the final output. Don’t “sketch” in Excel, PowerPoint, Word, or Photoshop. Sketch in one technology (paper, whiteboard, Post-its) and finish in another. Find ways to share ideas so they clearly communicate that this is a sketch to avoid the temptation to critique a sketch using the criteria of the finished product.

• Answering the right questions – Sketching works well when it understands the questions it is seeking to answer. Don’t try to answer detailed finishing questions in the early sketch process. Keep the sketching focused on the right questions and don’t get off track.

• A process of reflection and review – For sketching to be successful, it needs the author to be involved in a nearly simultaneous process of reflection and review. This means that the process of creating the sketch needs to be ‘plastic’ enough to be changed easily on the fly. Describing one idea in the sketch will change a previous decision and the sketch process needs to be able to respond to this easily.
  

Sketching is a powerful tool no matter what your discipline. Even if you don’t draw, everyone should sketch.