Conference Agenda

In the realm of design drawing, extensive research and professional expertise have been dedicated to identifying the techniques and specific methods employed by designers. However, limited knowledge has been captured as to the potential in-fluence of human biomechanics on the act of design drawing. This research en-deavors to scrutinize the specific hand postures adopted by a diverse group of de-signers, particularly those who are at the early stages of their design training, name-ly second-year design students. This exploration extends to investigating how these postures are influenced by prior exposure to design or art drawing instruction and, most crucially, how they impact factors such as pain, strain, and contribute to changes over time. To accomplish this, we gathered and analyzed a dataset of 284 images featuring a group of novice design drawing participants (n=71). The results indicate that certain postures may lend themselves to design drawing and reduce hand strain.

There has been much work towards understanding design sketching, its role and utility for design thinking. However, there remains little explanatory theory to structure our discussion of sketching and its importance. Drawing upon reflective practice as design paradigm and adopting a distributed theory of mind, I position sketching as distribution of design thinking. I provide an operational definition of the design sketch as particular type of design representation that includes sketch as articulation of future solution opportunities, variation in the expression of design intent through representational ambiguity, and the sketch as iconic representation. I locate the design sketch through a distributed lens to better illustrate its relation to design thinking in practice. The article contributes as framework and thesis argument for a distributed approach to understand design thinking through sketching. The paper concludes by providing a theoretical foundation and departure point for future studies of distributed design thinking through sketching.

Digital, immersive, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have propelled technology-focused design to the fore. Due to our technology-driven society and growing demand for technology literacy, the perceived need for traditional/analogue skills is being overlooked/underappreciated. Within product design (PD) education, students are increasingly embracing digital design tools to communicate, overlooking traditional/analogue tools. Subsequently, students are increasingly designing within the remits/restrictions of digital tools. This presents numerous challenges, including overreliance on computer aided design tools, perfectionism through corrective tools available with digital sketching platforms, and the complete disregard of quick concept generation in favor of AI. The power of the pen/pencil is being lost affecting the learning/appreciation of fundamental principles of design sketching/communication, a core skill required of every product designer. This paper presents our philosophical standpoint on design sketching and the development of a 24-week design sketching syllabus for product design 1st-year students focused on fundamental/traditional skills.

Previous scholars have advocated the significant value of sketching in design process-es. This paper first explores how design sketching functions as an agent for design, building on insights derived from both theory and practice. Interviews with professional designers in the field reaffirm the functions and importance of sketching. Not only for designers themselves, but also for their clients and consumers. Given the value of sketching and the variety of stakeholders involved, this paper then aims to structure the affordances of design sketching in a practical framework. Considering that af-fordances must be discoverable and perceivable in order to be effective, this paper subsequently proposes ideas for transforming the framework into a tool that will help designers to discover design sketching and unlock its benefits.

The global call for transformation towards a more just, sustainable and pluriverse world has also materialised within the design field, asking for new design practices that embrace open-ended and relational processes. Several approaches emerged over the last decades, built on different values, and investigating ontological, epistemological, ethical, and practical dimensions. In this pictorial, I explore what these new practices can be and do, through embarking on a drawing-philosophy correspondence journey. This pictorial shows my three-year quest to explore the role of drawing for researching design for societal transformation. By visually researching philosophical concepts such as correspondence, commoning, minor key, and human-technology-world relationships, this work aims to contribute to design-philosophy correspondence, by imagining, questioning, and researching philosophical concepts underlying alternative socio-material practices, and through this support the transformation of the everyday sociomaterial practices of organisation that are addressing the grand societal challenges.

Rivers worldwide are increasingly modified due to climate change, urbanization, and shifting land use patterns. This visual paper demonstrates how various drawing modes drive design research to uncover everyday practices along the modified riverfronts of the Citarum and Gombak Rivers in Indonesia and Malaysia, respectively. Three drawing approaches are employed to investigate different timelines, capture residents’ lived experiences, and illustrate riverfronts’ complex, socio-economic, spatial, and environmental attributes. Drawing histories involves using historical mapping and visual ethnographic methods to gain in-depth insights into the localities. Drawing narratives entails gathering and overlaying narratives, stories, and everyday activities within river corridors. Lastly, drawing entanglements involves exploring and revealing multi-layered relationships, connections, and patterns. Drawings have contributed to a spatial investigation and representation of the dynamic and complex status of the modified riverfronts, demonstrating a gap between the lived and planned and aiming to foster a dialogue into how this gap can be narrowed.