Design Drawing Warm Ups

 My senior Design and Visual Communication classes are at the point where they are doing concept ideas. These ideas have to be based on either the designer or the design era that they have been researching.

They come into the class either from mentoring first thing on a morning or from another class or from interval, so their heads are full of whatever has been going on beforehand. They can not be expected to sit down and just start thinking of design ideas. The students find it frustrating and unmanageable. I also talk to them about the power a blank piece of paper has on your mind when you stare at it for too long. They think I am crazy when we talk about this, but staring at a blank page for too long, trying to think of ideas, makes your mind blanker and blanker and makes it even more difficult to produce design ideas.

The first thing we have done for warm ups this week has been "30 seconds / 5 things". This is where I time them for 30 seconds and give them 5 things they have to draw in the time. For example, 5 things that start with the letter "T", 5 things that live in the sea, 5 things you wear on your head etc. They start off worrying about their drawing and maybe coming up with 2 things in the time. By the time we are on our 5th or 6th thing, they are drawing like crazy and not caring what it looks like. This gets them smiling, laughing at each others really rough drawings and settling into the lesson.

Our next activity was to draw a big scribble on an A4 piece of paper with their eyes closed. They then swapped scribbles with someone else.  They then had to look at the scribble and try and pick out a figure out of it - looking for heads, bodies, arms, legs etc. I talked to them about the human ability to see faces and figures in any random pattern we see.

Here is my example that I did on the board to show them what I meant.

We then moved to using these techniques in a way that will help our design ideas.

They drew straight line scribbles on one page and wavy line scribbles on another page. They then had swap with someone else and look to see shapes that could help their design work. Year 11 had to look for seating and Year 12 had to look for lighting. They could ignore their architect or design era inspirations at this point as I didn't want it to complicate matters for them.

They then took these onto a drawing sheet where they started to make them look more like a design for a seat or lighting. 

Here are my example that I did on the board and the start of the development onto paper of some of the designs.

Year 12 Lighting

Year 11 Seating

Here is some of the Year 12 lighting work form today.

I was really pleased with how they reacted to this new way of working and they all had designs started by the end of the lesson, which is not normal for when we start concept ideas.