At this point of the discussion it is fitting to introduce another closely related dialectic that is played out within the sketching act as a result of the visible traces these gestural images leave. The conversion of gesture into a trace allows multiple dimensions of meaning to become visible (registered and suspended in time) and thereby provide occasions for reflection and understanding. Tversky et al. (2009) recognises how gestures, in similar ways as discussed above, complement and supplement other modes in explanatory tasks. When gestures are captured on paper, they combine and integrate with other modes to contribute a rich set of meanings regarding size, shape, pattern, style, position, direction, order and quantity - both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. Their abstract connotations, mood, feeling or attitude can also be captured, each enhancing and developing the global meaning.
Visualised on paper, transitory positions become permanent places and transitory actions become inscriptions and forms. “Because they persist, they can be subjected to a myriad
perceptual processes: compare, contrast, assess similarity, distance, direction, shape, and size, reverse figure and ground, rotate, group and regroup; that is they can be mentally assessed and rearranged in multiple ways that contribute to understanding, inference, and insight” (Tversky, 2011: 500). The sketch thus becomes a tangible space or gathering ground in which multiple ways of knowing can be negotiated in a kind of dialogue.
Intangible ideas become more concrete through gesture and trace, where they connect and interact with knowledge in other forms and formats, whether coded or uncoded, linguistic, visual, or tacit. Katherine Henderson (1998: 204) maintains that these tangible actions construct the drafter’s visual culture and way of seeing, literally and figuratively: “years of drawing and thinking and thinking and drawing mean that the two become wholly intertwined”.
3.1 Interactive imagery
Analogous to McNeill’s (2005) depiction of gesture as enactment of imagery, Gabriella Goldschmidt (1991) proposes that sketching functions to extend mental imagery within a systematic dialectic which involves a circular feedback loop between imagery (internal representation) and sketch (external representation on paper). Through the additive process of sketching, the page soon shows or suggests unexpected arrangements and relationships among the graphic elements that allow new interpretations, and are produced fairly easily by drawing on further input from memory structures. Goldschmidt (1991: 131) refers to such self-generated sketching as “interactive imagery”. She argues that the self- generated sketch “talks back”, with its backtalk reflecting “some of the sketcher’s
innermost, tacit, otherwise untapped knowledge, biases, concerns, and preferences” (2003:
87). When a sketcher ascribes a meaning to the unintended results of a quick freehand sketch, this enables her to use it as a source of new information and thus make it serve as a tool to enhance design reasoning, especially in the “front edge”, conceptual phase.
Designers cultivate and exploit this inherent cognitive ability, which is already in evidence in young children.
Goldschmidt (2003) is interested in how the “backtalk” of a sketch – either one that is still in development, or one that has just been completed – assists in generating and
strengthening ideas. She uses a developmental axis to demonstrate how children find new information while reading their sketches, which then leads to redefinitions or refinements in what they take their sketches to be about. She shows that designers typically follow a
similar procedure in the initial idea-generation stage of the design process. Observation of children under the age of three showed that they make scribbles to which they then ascribe representational meaning retroactively, mostly in response to a given question. This
suggests that very young children do not make symbolic representations intentionally, but rather only read representational meaning into their scribbles once they are completed (Goldschmidt, 2003: 73). Even children as young as the age of two appear to have the ability to infer representational meaning from their own scribbles. The derived meaning seems to be directed by the properties of shape of the figures or the things that the child is occupied with at the time.
While older children use conventional and largely universal schemata to depict favourite objects, people or scenes, this conventional representational behaviour is abandoned when attempting to represent something new. Older children make similar inferences when they explore and experiment with the act of drawing. Goldschmidt argues that these
characteristics of graphic production are continued later on in childhood, maintained through adulthood, and ultimately constructively used by experts when solving design problems (Goldschmidt, 2003: 73).
To better understand the way sketching “engenders meaning”, Goldschmidt (2003: 74) gives a detailed analysis of a fragment from an older child’s drawing activity. A nine-year- old child, Naomi, who took part in what was termed a drawing game, was asked to respond to a picture shown her, by making a drawing whilst talking aloud. Goldschmidt took
particular interest in what the child said about aspects of the drawing that could not be traced back to the photograph on which the drawing was based. For certain details, such as very prominent buildings and the representation of hair, Naomi used conventions that contradicted what was depicted in the photograph. These departures from the photograph seemed to flow from a special interest in buildings that were old or tall, an interest which seemed to owe nothing to the photograph. Her own personal interest in old and tall buildings entered the process and was enacted in the drawing. Further insight was gained from her representational behaviour, which showed that she arrived at the interpretation of pregnancy simply because she had happened to draw the woman’s dress too large. “In other words, this was not a premeditated notion, but one that resulted from Naomi’s reading of what Schön6 called the drawing’s ‘backtalk’” (2003: 78). Goldschmidt (2003: 78)
6 Schön, D. 1983. The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action
notes that Naomi’s “after the fact attribution of meaning” is also evident in younger children’s drawing.
Naomi’s interpretations illustrate a principle which Goldschmidt (2003: 78) formulates as follows: “one reads off the sketch more information than was invested in its making”. It shows that, although a sketcher often does not have a clear or developed idea of what is about to be drawn, the act of drawing creates unforeseen graphic relations on the page, which may, if the sketcher attends to them, trigger further meanings that can be read into and enrich the rationale of the developing scenario. This is often the case in the initial phase of the design process, where the designer’s ability to extract information from her own sketch enhances her ability to approach a design problem by enlarging the problem space.
3.2 Dialectics of sketching
In another research project, Goldschmidt (1991) investigates the nature of design reasoning during sketching. Careful observation of architects engaged in intensive, fast freehand sketching in the early phase of a design task, reveals that sketching participates in design reasoning through a special kind of visual imagery. Goldschmidt (1991:123) identifies a pattern of pictorial reasoning, which she calls the “dialectics of sketching”. Reminiscent of the imagery-language dialectic observed in gesture, this dialectic moves between two modes of arguments, which relate to the figural and non-figural aspects of potential forms.
Goldschmidt (1991: 131) describes this dialogue of short sequences as arguments shifting between “seeing that” and “seeing as” arguments. “Seeing as” arguments are directly related to sketching, as they involve analogical reasoning and reinterpretation of figural properties of the sketch or the emergence of new figures. “Seeing that” arguments are non- figural, reflective claims concerning the design. These “arguments” are the designer’s efforts to explore and reason about the task.
The physical motions (moves) in response to the arguments lead to further drawing, which in turn feeds new arguments. Shifts happen cyclically within and across moves, the order of which is not important as shifts occur both ways in response to a guiding rule. Protocols revealed that all “seeing as” arguments were produced while sketching, whereas “seeing that” arguments were produced while sketching as well as while scrutinising the sketch.
This dialectic allows the designer to bridge two central aspects of design – the specific
referents) – by translating “the particulars of form into generic qualities and generic rules into specific appearances” (Goldschmidt, 1991: 139).
Goldschmidt (1991: 140) acknowledges that this kind of dialogue, and the “seeing as” and
“seeing that” modalities themselves, are not only found in sketching and designing, but also in a wide range of psychological and cultural phenomena. “Seeing as” occurs when physical metaphors are used in any discipline and has triggered many new developments as well as important breakthroughs, discoveries, or inventions. Her study focused on small-scale creative cognitive operations in reasoning while sketching. Compared to design protocols involving little or no sketching, sketching protocols showed far more “seeing as”
arguments, and the ongoing dialectic between as and that arguments was detected nowhere else. Even the use of diagrams or flow charts does not show the unique dialectical pattern between these two modes of visual reasoning that is brought about by sketching
(Goldschmidt. 1991: 140).
This dialectic has been recognised by many other researchers and is also referred to as the
“graphical conversation with the materials” (Schön, 1983) or “having a conversation with the drawing” (Lawson, 2006). While mental imagery has been acknowledged as an
important and useful cognitive resource in solving unusual, innovation-related, design and other creative problems, the materiality of sketching or interactive imagery gives it
advantages over mental images, partly because the latter tend to fade away so rapidly (Goldschmidt, 2003: 82-3). Donald Schön (1983: 157-8) notes: “The act of drawing can be rapid and spontaneous, but the residual traces are stable. The designer can examine them at leisure. The pace of action can be varied at will. The designer can slow down to think about what he is doing. On the other hand, events that would take a long time in the built world – the carving of a slope, the shaving of the trees – can be made to happen immediately in the drawing”. The drawing thus allows the designer to step back momentarily and reflect and in this reflection, or re-evaluation, the designer perceives patterns, which in turn encourage another cycle in drawing.
3.3 Dialectic as scaffolded action
The view of the sketch as a dialectic situation is suggestive of and compatible with two more Vygotskian ideas, in which the role of private speech and of scaffolded action are seen as important to cognitive development. Vygotsky was the pioneer of the notion that the use of shared language had a significant impact on cognitive development. Clark (1998: 163),
drawing on Vygotsky develops his own use of the term scaffolding to denote “a broad class of physical, cognitive and social augmentations which allow us to achieve some goal which would otherwise be beyond us”. An example of scaffolding is when a child is allowed to temporarily succeed thanks to the guidance, in the form of public speech of another human being, and then can later on, through private speech, conduct a similar dialogue with herself so as to guide behaviour, to focus attention, and to caution against usual errors (Clark, 1998: 164). More recent developmental research (Berk, 2004: 75-106) found that self-directed speech (vocal or silent inner rehearsal) is an important cognitive tool to guide behaviour, work through ideas, understand one’s experiences, and direct and control problem-solving actions.
How can a self-directed tool manage to play a guiding role when it seems mysterious “how we can tell ourselves anything we don’t already know?” Clark (1998: 165) suggests that this question can be approached by viewing language as a special kind of thought in which the actual thoughts are constituted by the words and sentences of language (1998: 165).
Goldschmidt takes up the same perspective when she maintains that the making of sketches is “thinking itself” (2003:80). She finds it telling that during the Renaissance, incomplete, partial, rapidly hand drawn images, or study sketches, were called “pensieri” – also the word for “thoughts” in contemporary Italian.
3.4 “A distributed, semi-anarchic cognitive engine”
McNeill, Goldwin-Meadow and Goldschmidt’s studies collectively indicate that the generative impact of gesture and its trace is a result of the dynamic relations between divergent modes of thinking within a mutually generative circuit. As an integrated cognitive system, the sketch act involves a variety of distinct parts whose contributions, although hugely different, participate in a generative dialectic between unlike cognitive modes. The sketch thus validates Clark’s (2008: 131) hypothesis that in some recognisable cognitive processes outputs are created (speech, gesture [traces], expressive actions, written words) that are reprocessed as inputs, and in this way drive the cognitive process along. It would thus be incorrect to say that gestures and traces merely clothe or materialise preformed ideas. Instead, gesture and trace emerge as interacting parts of what Clark (2008: 133) calls
“ a distributed, semi-anarchic cognitive engine, participating in cognitively potent self- stimulating loops whose activity is as much an aspect of our thinking as its result”.
Clark’s (2008: 133) picture of cognitive extension rejects the idea of an inner executive and instead considers the possibility of a set of more or less influential resources acting in parallel, with different components gaining the upper hand in different stages. By moving away from the image of an inner executive, space is made to reconceptualise the cognitive contribution of our practices of self-stimulation as practices that co-determine the way in which our thoughts originate or are constructed. Such processes thus expand our thoughts as opposed to merely maintaining them. In such a loose-knit, distributed representational and information-processing economy, materialised imagistic content may augment, refine, expand and sometimes productively conflict with other elements in the same thinking space. Together, the dialectics of gesture and sketching fits Clark’s (2008: 135) model of self produced outputs which enter into loosely coupled forms of coordination dynamics to allow the overall system to explore trajectories through “thinking space”.
3.5 Epistemic actions and cognitive routines
If the conjectures of the preceding discussion are correct, gestures and traces, amongst other self generated structures, form part of an integrated on-going coupled dialectic which has survived precisely because of the cognitive capacities it enables. If the ideational
drawing is a productive thinking space, it is no surprise that Rosenberg (2008: 110) proposes that we view it as an “epistemological object”. It epitomises the notion of an
“epistemic action” as presented by Kirsh and Maglio (1994: 513), for: “external actions that an agent performs to change his or her own computational state”(1994: 514). Clark (2008:
73) cites Kirsh to suggest that in such closed-loop interactions respect for the hallowed boundary between what is internal and what is external not only hinders analysis, but also does not have the computational significance we tend to ascribe to it:
Once we conceive the agent environment relation to be a dynamic one where agents are causally coupled to their environments at different temporal frequencies with less or more conscious awareness of the nature of their active perceptual engagement, we are moving in a direction of seeing agents more as managers of their interaction, as coordinators locked in a system of action reaction, rather than as pure agents undertaking actions and awaiting consequences (Kirsh, 2004: 7-8).
Clark (2008: 74) expands on this idea when he considers “the swirl of organisation”
involved in such integrated unfoldings:
In such cases, the brain is not required explicitly to represent the availability of such and such information from any given internal or external location.
Instead it simply deploys a problem-solving routine whose fine structure has been selected (by learning and practice) so as to assume the easy
availability of such and such information from (for example) such and such a visual location via the performance of such and such a gross motor action.
Assumptions about the problem domain have here become built into whole perception- action loops. Clark (2008:75) proposes that the structuring of resources in such complex distributed “problem-solving ensembles” should be thought of in terms of implicit meta- cognitive commitments where the possible availability of useful information need nowhere be represented in the brain.