Another approach that I find has a resonance for me was the ‘Drawing Futures’ symposium at the Bartlett School of Architecture in 2016. This event explored the value of analogue activity and culminated in the publication ‘Drawing Futures: Speculations in Contemporary Drawing for Art and Architecture’ (Allen & Pearson, 2016). The book examines the evolving role of drawing in art and architecture, emphasising its potential as a speculative, generative, and experimental tool rather than merely a means of communication.
Drawing Futures frames drawing as “thinking in movement” (p. 218), highlighting its kinetic nature and its ability to transcend representation. It becomes a critical medium for exploration and discovery, bridging traditional analogue methods with modern digital advancements. This synthesis reshapes drawing as a dynamic, hybrid practice that intersects with computational tools, algorithmic processes, and material experimentation, enabling interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative design thinking.
A key theme is the blending of analogue and digital practices, illustrating how ambiguity fosters creativity. Drawing acts as a bridge between the tangible and the conceptual, allowing creators to test and reinterpret ideas. Digital tools amplify this process by introducing scalability, precision, and interactivity, while analogue methods provide spontaneity, immediacy, and intuition.
The publication also reflects on drawing’s interdisciplinary potential, connecting it to science, data visualisation, and emerging technologies. The editors argue that “thinking is itself, by its nature, kinetic” (p. 218), emphasising drawing as an active cognitive process that contrasts with the static nature of working on a computer.
Several projects in ‘Drawing Futures’ exemplify these themes:
- ‘Intermediary Role of Drawing’: Elisabeth Shotton’s “Augmented Maritime Histories” (p. 34) demonstrates how analogue sketches layered with digital projections create dynamic reinterpretations, extending drawing’s cognitive and representational reach.
- ‘Kinetic and Reflexive Thinking’: Analogue drawing fosters tactile engagement, which is amplified by digital tools like styluses and tablets. This interaction merges the intuitive quality of hand drawing with the precision of digital environments, embodying “thinking in movement” (p. 218).
- ‘Generative Techniques’: Matthew Austin and Gavin Perin’s “Drawing the Glitch” (p. 15) introduces computational errors into digital workflows. These glitches interact with hand-drawn components, creating unpredictable forms that transform drawing into a tool for experimentation and discovery.
- ‘Material Computation’: ecoLogicStudio’s “Polycephalum” project (p. 49) combines analogue tracing of natural growth patterns with digital modeling to visualise environmental data, showcasing how iterative processes bridge intuition and computational refinement.
The text also describes drawing as “alive” through its evolving nature, blending analogue and digital practices to transform drawings into active artifacts (p. 28).
The integration of these approaches can be summed up in three points:
- ‘Analogue as Foundation’: Traditional drawing provides spontaneity and serves as a conceptual basis.
- ‘Digital as Amplifier’: Computational tools enhance precision and expand expressive capabilities.
- ‘Hybrid Creativity’: Combining both methods fosters experimentation, breaking boundaries in design.
The book reflects on how the introduction of computers has affected the act of drawing: “The hand gestures of drawing a line have been replaced by the pressing of ‘keys,’ the clicking of ‘buttons’ and the moving of ‘mice’” (p. 6), while algorithms “fundamentally change the relationship between drawer and drawn” (p. 10).
Saul Steinberg captures the essence of drawing’s potential, describing it as ‘a sort of reasoning on paper’ (‘The Artist and the Book in the Twentieth Century’, 1989). This sentiment resonates throughout ‘Drawing Futures’, underscoring the medium’s power to inspire new ways of thinking, creating, and engaging with the world.
Allen, A. & Pearson, D., 2016. ‘Drawing Futures: Speculations in Contemporary Drawing for Art and Architecture’. London: UCL Press.
Steinberg, S., 1989. ‘The Artist and the Book in the Twentieth Century’. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.