The Role of Sketching in Product Design
Learning a complex skill like product design can be painful because we’re flexing new muscles. We’re growing them, whether mental or whether in our eye-hand coordination. Taking shortcuts may risk the nourishment and development of your ideas. There is something that cannot be replaced from the incremental growth of an idea, pulling it apart, doubting it, not falling in love with your own drawing. When you become enamored with your own drawings, then your product development designs become about your own drawings, and they lose the real goal, which is beyond yourself and your individual aesthetic appreciation.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love drawing. As you might learn in any product design education, you should draw at least 20 sketches a day, rain or shine. These should be of anything, using any material. Your drawings can be based on simple subjects, such as your own hand. They might be of the book that you’re holding or the person sitting across from you on the subway. Just draw. Keep your sketchbook with you wherever you are to be able to take notes, to draw, to sketch. And you should experiment with rendering techniques using different colored pencils, water-soluble colored pencils, gouache, or digital software. All are valuable tools. You should experiment with all of them. You might adopt strategies offered in an online product design education class.
But when you rush to finish and try to create that facsimile too quickly, you are cheating yourself from the real subtlety and nuance of what the product can and should become. And the chances are you’re actually creating shortcuts that are eliminating the creative flow; they’re shortening the field, so to speak, reducing some of the complexities that you should engage with in testing your idea in the broader world. Ultimately, the question you should be asking is not just what it looks like and how you can sell somebody on it, but why are you doing it in the first place? Why are you making another artifact in this particular design and material?
