Sunday 23 March 2008

ACM Interactions magazine article, Pencils Before Pixels: A primer in hand-generated sketching

Recently reading up on expressive rendering and hand-drawn driven graphics and how they can influence user perspective and choice. Loosely fitting in with that theme I have come across a great article at the ACM Interactions magazine titled Pencils Before Pixels: A primer in hand-generated sketching by Mark Baskinger.

According to said article drawings and sketches can be powerful and persuasive representations of ideas, events, sequences, systems and objects. As part of a larger collaborative design process, hand drawing can serve as a key method for thinking, reasoning and exploring opportunities, yet inherently differs from wire-frames and conceptual models. Innately, interaction designers employ a variety of methods for representing ideas and information, both internally in a cognitive sense, and externally in the devices we employ to record, share and reflect. However, competency in sketching and drawing by hand seems to be diminishing across design disciplines making it a more highly desired skill in contemporary design practice. In addition, there seems to be an apparent phenomenon of fear when it comes to drawing ideas. For many practicing designers, they have convinced themselves that they can’t draw and thus position themselves to the periphery in concept generation…

Anyone with an ACM Digital Library subscription can read the full magazine article at http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1081.

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