Reading Response to Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool
In the article, Rohde conceptualizes sketching as a thinking process to generate ideas, explore the alternatives, and foster advanced discussions. He sees sketching as a necessary tool to capture the thoughts in mind. This reminds me of the idea of post-modernism, which deplored the essence of
Essentially, language is inseparable from the meaning making process, and too often it is obstructed by the arbitrary relationship between the signified and the signifier. Nevertheless, the insight on sketching surpasses boundaries of the language. The authority of the individual ideas is implemented in an independent version of interpretation, therefore the sketching drawn on a piece of paper belongs to nobody else but the person who drew. Inevitably, a more delicate analysis involves a discourse on whether the ideas are self-motivated or determined by the structure, yet disregarding the root concept, sketching assumes a relatively optimistic role in democratizing and liberating individualistic practice, which is rooted in daily experience to understand the world not through big theories but everyday life.
For Rohde, the key to invite ideas by sketching is to withhold judgement of them until it is complete, which encourages me to reflect on my thinking process. Personally, I believe there is never a method that applies to each individual; however, the reason I resisted visual thinking somehow resides in my self-judgement of not being creative enough. Frankly, the title of the article scared me at first glance. Paralleling sketching with visual thinking power touches on the inner struggle that I am aware of deep down, but always turned my eyes away instead of confronting it: I lack creativity, or that I once had it but lost it somewhere on the path of growing up. In all likelihood, I would never have to use sketching to design or develop a product in a future career, but the article rekindles my urge to sustain sketching because I realized my focus should have been on the means instead of the end. Relatively, men differ from animals because they can produce their means of life. Visual thinking, in this light, is regarded as a means of production that outputs ideas and meaning making.
Although I remain skeptical of the human “consciousness” and still believe the social that creates the material is the social precedes us, it is worth growing a habit that reaffirms and reestablishes my control over my intention, my thoughts, and my mind, because just as Foucault once stated,
“In knowing we control and in controlling we know.”