Going beyond
object sketching
A new vocabulary of sketching and visualisations should facilitate mutual communication between
designers, engineers, users, specialists and all other stakeholders during these design processes.
By Jan Corremans and Maaike Mulder-Nijkamp
New levels of complexity and
abstraction in the eld of
industrial design require
new powerful visualisations
to analyse, discover, express and depict
progressions, emotions, experiences,
stories, scenarios and other intangible
aspects involved in the system.
Published taxonomies (see below)
thoroughly cover all sketches and
drawings applied in object-oriented
industrial design projects, but the scope
of industrial design constantly broadens,
so the designer needs to extend his/
her sketch vocabulary with sketch types
adopted from related elds.
For example, systemic design is a
recent discipline in the eld of design. It
integrates systems thinking and humancentred
design with the intention of
helping designers cope with complex
design projects. The recent challenges
to design coming from the increased
complexity caused by globalisation,
migration and sustainability render
traditional design visualisation methods
insuf cient.
An example is gigamapping. This
creates an information cloud for
visualising complexity from which a
designer can derive innovative solutions.
It serves as a method that is both
systemic and designerly. According
to Birger Sevaldson, it has proven to
be an ultimate bridging device within
groups of collaborators, and enables the
development of a shared understanding of
construction systems
(see also www.is.gd/udumoh).
One role of the designer in the
systemic method is to stimulate and
participate in co-creation sessions and to
sketch/visualise on-the-spot contributions
from the different stakeholders to
facilitate communication.
Another role of the designer is
to visualise the synthesis of the
analysis. The sketches made during
the analysis and design process serve
more as a visual thinking tool than
a communications tool. The nal
gigamap is a graphically well-balanced
infographic-mind map communicating and
summarising all discussed issues.
Other types of systemic design
sketches recently added to the spectrum
of the designers’ sketch vocabulary
include user experience sketches, process
sketches, product service design sketches
and customer journey illustrations. What
these new sketches and visualisations
have in common is the fact that they are
mostly non-object related. For example,
sketches made in the early stages of
a new product development phase of
complex systems designs depict more
the mutual relations between the different
stakeholders, the evolution of the project
in time, the context of the problem, the
different system design possibilities,
than any possible hardware components
involved.
If the goal of
design educational
programmes is to
prepare students
to become skilled
creative people in a
fast-evolving industrial
design and engineering
landscape, students’ sketch
competences should extend
beyond merely object-related
sketches and drawings. For design
schools, this insight could mean a
major revision of drawing courses.
Ty pes of product drawings
A number of sketching and drawing stages
in new product development were listed in
Loughborough University’s ID Cards project
(www.is.gd/fuhuci)
Idea sketch
Study sketch
Referential sketch
Memory sketch
Coded sketch
Information sketch
Sketch rendering
Prescriptive sketch
Scenario & storyboard
Layout rendering
Presentation rendering
Diagram
Perspective drawing
General arrangement drawing
Detail drawing
Technical illustration
18 www.ied.org.uk
/udumoh)
/fuhuci)
/www.ied.org.uk