Design by drawing

We have not always designed by drawing.
 Originally, and still to this day in many places and
under many circumstances, designers were and are
primarily makers  or crafters. They made objects
ranging from small personal and household utensils
 through larger pieces of equipment used in 
agriculture or otherprimitive industries, to  houses and civic buildings and
even complete towns.

All this was largely made without significant use of drawn plans. Things were made by either copying or adapting what had been done before. This process is usually described as ‘vernacular’ when applied to architecture and as ‘blacksmith’ when applied to industrial products. The imaginer and the maker were
parts of one single undifferentiated role.

Some charming documentations of such a process can be found in George Sturt’s account of making cartwheels (Sturt, 1923) and of Benfield’s account of stonemasonry (Benfield, 1940). A more thorough analysis of the characteristics of this primitive form of design of How Designers Think (Lawson, 1997).

What is clear from such accounts is that the forms of knowledge used by the vernacular designer are quite different to those used by the modern professional designer. In particular vernacular designers clearly have
a great deal of knowledge about the difficulties and practicalities of making and crafting their objects. In today’s modern highly technical world with rapidly advancing and developing materials and manufacturing processes, the professional designer often cannot make the objects he or she designs. Such designers
indeed may know surprisingly little about the making of their objects.

However, the paradox is that the modern designer can adapt to new technologies and circumstances whereas the vernacular designer is hopelessly lost in the face of any rapid change. George Sturt’s wheelwrights, for example, would have had no idea how to design wheels for a machine with an internal combustion engine or how to make use of the pneumatic tyre.
The results of vernacular design are often attractive and may increasingly appeal to us in our uncertain
and shifting modern world as they offer a glimpse of a more stable age. But the process of vernacular or craft design relying as it does on gradual adaptation is so unsuitable for our contemporary world that we shall not be much more concerned with it here.

The modern designer then experiments not with the object itself but with representations of it, and in this chapter we shall be concerned with the drawn representations. We shall examine them for the knowledge embodied in them and the insights they can give us into what designers know.

 The advent of design by drawing was to give the designer what Chris Jones (1966) so aptly described as a ‘greater perceptual span’. The designer could experiment in the drawing rather than on the made object. The larger, more complex and expensive the made object, the greater the impact resulting from this change. It is
not surprising therefore that architecture was transformed by this development.

Of course in modern industrialized societies we now make even more expensive and complex objects such as aeroplanes, ships and spacecraft that could never have been contemplated without the power of design by drawing. In fact most of those objects would be hard to conceive of now without the next step forward
of design by computer. We shall look at that in a later chapter.