Teaching 'how to sketch visual stories' to a professional audience

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the discipline of design sketching and drawing. Whereas its origin lies in the sketching and presenting of tangible (industrially designed) products, the discipline has, since approximately 2010, extended in various ways, along various dimensions. Various authors have addressed and discussed the most prominent change within the discipline since: the addition of so-called ‘story telling visuals’: sketches of processes, overviews, systems and e.g. journeys (Corremans and Mulder-Nijkamp 2019, Hoftijzer, Sypesteyn et al. 2020), also named ‘visual thinking’. In fact, sketching as a means of communication has grown across discipline borders, and, consequently, the activity of sketching for communication enjoys a growing group of actors and audience these days. The authors, being sketching practitioners and teachers, have been developing sketching course content aligned to this, both for the extending discipline (Bachelor and Master courses) of sketching within Industrial Design and for new audiences. One particular course, a so-called ‘Master Class’, which is an intensive two-day taking course to an external audience, focused on ‘how to sketch visual stories’, was subject to an experiment. Firstly, the course was designed according to specific requirements (audience, goals, pedagogy) and to previous insights of course development and evaluation, of workshops offered, and according to previously described vision and methodology that concerns the alignment between sketches of tangible things and sketches of abstract concepts (Hoftijzer, Sypesteyn et al. 2020). Secondly, in order to assess the logic and quality of the short course’s structure and contents, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire. Together, this experimental set-up, the questionnaire results, and the sketched output of the Master Class have led to new insights, to new knowledge that will help improve the pedagogic approach of many of the current courses taught and to the follow up Master Class in particular.