Conversations with Myself: Sketching Workshop Experiences in Design Epistemology

Abstract

I was not born a designer - sometime this identity shift must have happened. I was unaware of it, and if asked, I would still not know how to define a "designer". Drawing and sketching are activities intrinsic to the design discipline, and are widely understood as tools for communication, documentation, or artefact-driven reasoning. But are they also essential to the understanding of design knowledge? Or a symptom of a designer's identity rather than a tool for "designerly ways of knowing"? During a week-long design workshop I dealt with difficulties making sense of a panoply of embodied design methods in the absence of a sketchbook. In this pictorial I describe my self-diagnosis as a sketch-bound designer, unable to digest abstract knowledge without holding a pen. I advocate for sketching as focusing, and a primary activity in design epistemology that needs no other than a first-person reason to be performed.