Sketching Seminar with Dave Malouf (Savannah College of

Art & Design)

June 24, 2009

In the seminar we started with an interesting exercise testing our design

stamina: draw as many different versions of a clock as you can in 20
minutes. About 50 is not unusual according to Dave.

According to Dave:

Design requires serendipity – happy accidents. Design must be playful,

fun, optimistic, tear down walls. Sketching is for creating associations that
lead to happy accidents. With design you don’t know what you’ll get in the
end; you have to trust your ability to get something useful.

Dave discussed cultural anthropology (though it’s not clear how this relates
to sketching):
• emic - analysis of cultural phenomena from the perspective of one who
participates in the culture being studied.
• etic - analysis of cultural phenomena from the perspective of one who
does not participate in the culture being studied.

Luke W (with Yahoo now) wrote about Parti, an architectural concept, for
evaluating design
http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/PartiDesignSandwich-LukeW.pdf

To assist with building you design stamina, think of adjectives like skewed,
twisted, distorted, emphasis, shape.

Sketches are rough, disposable - low investment needed for honest

critiques, multiplicity – need a lot of them.

Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences – best book on the topic. Bill says
that:
Engineering thinking is about the reduction of ideas.
Design thinking is about creating new combinations of ideas.

You can’t write & listen at the same time, so sketching is best when listening.
A recent study shows that doodling aids concentration and memory
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/27/bad-news-for-
teachers-research-says-doodling-boosts-concentration/
From Sketching User Experience

You need to sketch everyday to improve skills & try it with different kinds of
music to spark associations. See Konigi.com – Tools for Ideation including
Wireframe sketchpads & books (with blue grids that don’t copy). Use a
pencil or felt tip pen so you can alter the line width. To activate your kinetic
mind you should draw on paper instead of using a mouse, unless you have a
digital pen like a Livescribe pen or a Watcom tablet.

David Gray of Xplane does the best business graphics.

http://www.xplane.com/

Good TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson – how Ed is ruining creativity;

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity
.html
Rosling a Scandinavian statistician on data & discovery
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_se
en.html

Other good books:

• Back of the Napkin
• Presentation Zen
• Rapid Viz

When sketching design for UI, consider flow, time, layout, labeling, controls,
conditionals, metaphor, and abstraction

IDEO as a product to help facilitate creativity – method cards,

http://www.ideo.com/work/item/method-cards
Video sketches show the human context of product use, providing a shared
vision for stakeholders. Suggestion: life without the new product followed by
life after the new product.
Great example: Commuter buddy http://www.vimeo.com/3056252. You can
use Windows Movie Maker or Mac iMovie or something expensive like
AfterEffects.

Need stories with robust characters situated in a human environment.

Comics can help you gain empathy & add visual representation to a situation
description.
Great book – Scott McCloud’s Understating Comics.
Comic Touch is software for making comics.

You need to be pationate about your users.

IDEO’s Deep Dive (Niteline) is a good video about fast, design process.
Check for it on YouTube.