Exploring Designers’ Knowledge Retention of Drawing

Abstract

The knowledge of drawing in design currently face abandonment regarding teaching and learning. Research shows the effects of this scenario on design professionals, who feel inhibited or embarrassed to draw because they lack confidence in their own technical skills, and on companies who commonly seek design professionals proficient in drawing skills. This research aims to determine the representation needs essential to drawing in design, verifying designers’ knowledge retention of drawing and comparing to the literature. First, a critical review of drawing typologies in design was developed, with the aim of outlining thematic structures essential to drawing in contemporary design, gathering characteristics and basic knowledge to develop drawings according to their specific usage. Based on a literature review on typologies of drawing in design and related areas, drawing pedagogy and the need to improve drawing teaching in general, an online questionnaire was developed and globally distributed to design professionals. The questionnaire survey was directed to designers with professional experience to highlight the usage of drawing in professional settings. Respondents were asked about their professional relationship with drawing, the validity of drawing practice for contemporary design and general knowledge about the types of drawing used in the scope of design. Based on the results of the questionnaire it has been shown that designers still perceive significant relevance in the use of drawing in a professional context, and reaffirm the great influence of higher education in drawing learning. The vast majority of respondents tend to avoid types of visual representation that are technically complex, and more than half of the respondents do not practice any form of skill improvement. And the analysis of drawing typologies helped to explore common themes between the types of drawing, allowing them to be thematically defined accordingly. Finally, another experiment was developed with graduate students, in order to verify the correspondence between themes of drawings in design and the students’ representation. Results indicate that the non-formal setting of drawing teaching impairs learning, and that the designer who is not proficient in drawing suffers from the constraint of incapacity, resulting in a premature search for the use of digital platforms for visual representation. Incompetence in drawing prolifically affects the creativity and professional potential of the designer, as well as impoverishing the complexity of the developed artifacts and hindering communication between co-workers and clients. The drawings made by the participants showed a low volume of characteristics considered necessary in the literature, characterizing the drawings insufficient for professional use.