The Backtalk of Self-Generated Sketches

Introduction Drawing and sketching are activities all humans engage in, at some level or another, as of a very young age (if not deprived of the sense of sight). In developed societies, toddlers use drawing implements to make marks on paper. In less-developed societies, children and adults use sticks to draw on sand. Why do children draw? It seems that for a child, drawing is a form of play, with developmental benefits similar to those of both symbolic play and construction games (play typology instituted by Piaget and Inhelder). Most people acquire enough drawing skills during childhood to make graphic production an accessible strategy whenever pictorial representation is more effective than linguistic representation in communication and reasoning. For some communication and reasoning tasks, however, ordinary drawing skills are not sufficient, just as linguistic skills acquired during childhood are not necessarily adequate for sophisticated verbal and written expression tasks. A better command of language makes for better orators and reporters, and a better command of drawing skills makes for better illustrators and decorators. A special class of representational skill, linguistic or graphic, is the one needed for inventive purposes: this is the case of the poet, the visual artist, and the designer. The inventive process does not require wider skills: not necessarily a larger vocabulary or unlimited graphic techniques. Rather, what is required is an ability to use the representational act to reason with on the fly. Usually, this is a “front edge” process in which partial and rudimentary representations are produced, evaluated, transformed, modified, refined, and replaced by others if need be, until their maker is satisfied with the results. The unique thing about such processes is that, since they involve ill-structured problem-solving, it is not clear at the outset where the process is leading to, and what the end result might be. In this paper, it is our purpose to look at the way in which sketching assists in generating ideas and strengthening them by interpreting the “backtalk” of a sketch in progress, or one that has just been completed. We use a developmental axis to illustrate our claims. We start with children and show how they “read” new information off their sketches or drawings, and use it to define or refine the rationale for their representations. We then show how designers habitually practice a similar process in the early idea-generation phase of the design process.