Sketching for Fun and Profit

If, like me, you are reluctant to show your sketches to other people, be sure to read Art Markman’s new Psychology Today blog post, Tools for Innovation III: Sketches and your brain. Art is a friend and a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. The post is one of three recent ones based on ideas (in this case from a chapter by Barbara Tversky and Masaki Suwa) from an Oxford University Press book he and UT engineering professor Kristin Wood co-edited, Tools for Innovation. When you have ideas for innovation, sometimes the best ways to think about, formulate and communicate them are by making some sort of visual representation, even if it is crude, dashed off and open to interpretation. But Art correctly points out that many of us are concerned about what people will think of our less-than-stellar artistic talents, so we either don’t make the sketch, or don’t show it to others. “But it is these very limitations in our ability to sketch perfect what we are thinking,” he writes, “that leaves room for those drawings to be reinterpreted.” If we can get over this limitation, there is a potential for a real breakthrough, because other people may have interpretations we wouldn’t have considered, and that can sharpen our thinking. Another concept he points out is that since so much of the brain is visually-oriented, limiting your ideas to either spoken words, or words on paper, can act as a damper on your creativity. In a similar vein, see Dan Roam’s bestselling book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.