Thinking on drawing
Drawing, a timeless practice, is both the act of creating thought and the process of thinking itself.
Drawing is a simultaneous act of motion and creation, an ongoing process of making and experiencing. It involves evolving through the accidental, transforming with the unexpected, and discovering what is new. Ultimately, it is about pushing beyond the boundaries of what is planned or preconceived, and finding freedom in that departure. (G.B.S.)
“There were sounds before speaking, shapes before writing.” Drawing is an instinctive act that goes beyond learned conventions. Used across many disciplines and expressed through a wide range of techniques and visual languages, drawing remains one of the most common forms of communication in contemporary practice. It can appear as informal scribbles in the margins of a notebook or take on the structured language of specialised fields, with their own methods and forms.
For architects and designers, drawing is akin to speaking or writing: it is the simultaneous expression of thought through the hand. It is a medium for conveying, critiquing and interpreting ideas. Beyond its artistic dimension, drawing is a fundamentally cognitive activity. So, despite the evolution of tools and technologies, freehand drawing, arguably the most direct form of expression, continues to offer fertile ground for exploration and discovery.
The intellectual aspects of drawing were examined in depth in GBS’s doctoral thesis and the published work around it. Drawing on cognitive frameworks such as extended, distributed and enactive cognition, the study used protocol analysis and observation of drawing processes to map the sequence of actions during creative production. The research argues that drawing is a form of cognitive production, an intellectual space in itself, and lays a theoretical foundation for further inquiry.
