Unformed drawing: notes, sketches, and diagrams

Abstract

This text discusses drawing as a place where design imagination and critical thinking intersect. In particular, it examines the role informal notes, sketches and diagrams play in the development and communication of architectural ideas difficult to describe in either only words or only images. Note-making shifts between writing and drawing, and takes advantage of both. Sketches work as intuitive devices, stimulating the imagination, entailing spontaneous action, but also posing questions and tempting one's curiosity to explore things through longer processes. Diagrams, on the other hand, are spatio-temporal abstractions that use more intellectual means of representation. They extract the fundamental issues of a scheme and visually articulate them in the form of signs. Architects need notes, sketches and diagrams to imagine, understand relationships, construct and communicate what is important. Once a project is completed a revision of old scribbles, made during its creation, often reveals lost possibilities and different paths that might have been taken. Because of their minimal and incomplete form, notes, sketches and diagrams are open to variable interpretations. They can be ambivalent but trap a dense residue of intentions and meanings difficult to express in more elaborate modes of representation. Notes, sketches and diagrams are fundamental tools of human creativity and communication, and they have significant implications for the progress of design knowledge: as ambiguous rather than prescribed signs, they enhance collaboration, doubt and change. As unformed and incomplete drawings, they lead to new architectural possibilities (Figs 1, 2, 3, 4).