Throughout the history of art and design, the practice of drawing has served as a way to explore, test and communicate visual and spatial concepts. In particular, the sketch has been valued for an indeterminacy that allows multiple design paths to stay open for reinterpretations, adjustments and new insights. This unfinished quality positions the sketch in an explorative and dialogical mode, a mode of visual research rather than just being an end-station. Beyond drawing skills, what is at stake in design education is whether a student’s drawing practice becomes embedded in attitudes and motivations suitable to the explorative and dialogic nature of creative practices. Learning conditions should encourage students to explore a range of methods in personal and meaningful ways.

Referring to Donald Schön’s concept of ‘reflection in action’ and the ‘back-talk’ of sketches, I suggest that drawing education should give attention to the incentives, attitudes and values evoked in the educational situation. Drawing can be used to trigger lines of questioning, active doubting, and reflective cycles of framing and reframing definitions and purposes. Drawing is then an exploration into possibilities, a dialogical process of individual and mutual speculation. Education for this purpose requires learning situations that challenge students to explore and reflect with their drawings. Here, drawing’s purpose is not to persuade but rather to inhabit a problem space, provoke alternatives and evoke possibilities. Alongside the necessity of developing drawing skills in design engineering education is the potential for the practice of drawing as learning in itself; as noticing, exploring, reflecting, sharing ideas and developing new sensitivities.

The current educational context, however, is impatient and often focused on short-term goals and tangible, measurable outcomes. This context seems to favour more straightforward training. Students of design engineering often also prefer to be taught well-defined skills in a simple and direct way. In a context where conventional standards and protocols are highly valued, this educational project created small divergences from the conventions of training in an effort to encourage creative exploration and dialogic learning experiences. The project explored the potentials of collaborative drawing, alternative materials, aesthetic concepts, speculative assignments, gesture and touch, and spatial verbs. The students’ experience of these exercises and assignments were described and reflected upon in interviews and journals.

External critic: Klaas Hoek (course leader, MA Fine Art, MaHKU, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht; lecturer, MA Fine Art Media, Head of Print, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London)