What is Design Drawing?

Explaining Designing to Children
At the core of design capability is visualisation and the ability to manipulate models in the mind. This fundamental skill of manipulating and rotating mental images enables us to explore multiple ideas and possibilities. It exist in all people, including small children. The ability to see and model both in the mind's eye and with the hand is a mode of thinking from which we derive our capacity to design and understand designing. To record such intentions in drawn form, however, is a sophisticated process.

Designing and Playing
Children do not only play, they also "make for play" (e.g. making clothes for dolls, constructing hides and dens) which has close parallels to designing.

In this "making for play" children are prepared to do a fair amount of pretending. A doiley can be a doll’s hat or a large cardboard box can be a train today and a house tomorrow. Total realism is not the aim, all that is required is enough to satisfy the requirements of the play. These are tools for play - a fantasy world which mirrors reality but occupies a different plane of existence. When the game ends, the tools are discarded or re-assigned. The symbolism which accompanies the fantasy role-playing of small children is vital to the abilities which underlie design as manipulation of symbols. Those children who have rich imaginative play are better at visualisation and hence design tasks.

Winnicott (1971) described play as arising from the capacity to make bridges imaginatively between our own inner reality and the external. Children’s play occupies a space between this inner and outer reality in which they use objects from outer reality with ideas from inner reality to create a "dream potential". These are the same skills that designers use.

Playing and Drawing
The "design drawing" does fit into a young child’s playspace. A drawing or painting fulfils no function in the children’s play or imagination once it is finished. It may be shown or given to someone else - to Mum or Nan or to their teacher. At the end of the day my desk is often littered with drawings "For you" from my Year 1 class, but I do not get presents of models. They want to keep them for playing with. A model can be manipulated, become a spring-board for play, stimulate the imagination further. Drawings have no such function in the young children's minds. Models might go into the role play area. Drawings don’t. Neither do they produce drawings in there, even if pens and paper are placed ready. They write messages to go in the bottle, spells for the witch or bills and "Open" signs for the shop, but they don’t make drawings to play with. Drawings, it seems, are not play-props.

Equally, little children do not want to have several tries on one sheet, as a planning and exploration tool, which will form the basis of something to be made in another media. They want to produce a picture, including what the weather was like behind and with the grass and flowers in front. This is the genre which they are just mastering and in which they want to demonstrate their skill.

So how do we teach them the genre of design drawing? We know that young children have no problem drawing. In free choice time, my Year 1s chorus "Can we draw?" But what their drawings record is the past and the present. It may capture a narrative, they may tell a story as they draw, but once the drawing is finished, the activity is ended. In contrast, in designing we are asking them to capture the possibilities of the future on paper and then evaluate and change those possibilities into something realistic that can be made with the materials available.

A Metaphor for Designing
This is where I think the use of a metaphor comes in. Young children have no problem with analogy. They are saturated in a world of metaphor and analogy. Most of our teaching exploits or assumes children have the skill. If I show a class of children a worked example on the white board, I assume they can extract the principle or technique from my example and not just apply it to every other example of the same kind that I might give them, but that it will become part of the shared understanding on which we base our talk about such things tomorrow.

So part of our shared understanding about designing will be the Container and Journey Metaphor:

This idea is explained further on the Theory Page.

The programme of Stan lessons is ideally suited to explaining this metaphor since Stan goes in an envelope to Chalifornia. The teacher can explain to the children that drawing can be a like a bag that you put ideas into. It is possible to take the bag of ideas on a journey.

Over the series of three lessons, the children will learn about a character who goes on a journey. This is paralleled to the way our ideas can go on journeys in our heads, and across a sheet of paper and on into making a model. The drawings can help us take those ideas further than if we just used our heads alone. It gives us places to rest and think about where we have got to and which turning we might like to take next. It gives us the opportunity to decide that we preferred a place further back on our journey and to be able to go back there and take a different turning.

Using drawing is better than our heads because we can’t forget our ideas once we’ve recorded them, and we can review our ideas and make choices about them.

Using drawing is better than going straight into the making because we can make, develop and change to our ideas before wasting time and materials.

The series of three lessons based on Flat Stanley play on the metaphor. Stan goes on a journey in his envelope; the children’s ideas go on a journey through their drawings.

The lessons based on Flat Stanley teach the strategy. The container / journey metaphor is explicitly taught; the children are shown how to exploit it.