Workshop on Sketching at Newcastle

What do you know, it's the season of workshops. On Wednesday, we had one at Culture Lab on sketching, which was organised by the INSCAPE project (funded by the EU). Bill Buxton was supposed to give one keynote (having written the influential book on sketching) but had to pull out on short notice.

The workshop nevertheless turned out to be quite interesting, with lots of different methods and perspectives being presented. Bill Gaver and Andy Boucher gave a talk on the design process (and their use of sketching within it) that led to some of the Equator systems (PlaneTracker, DriftTable), which was quite interesting as I was only familiar with the end product. I also quite liked Patrick's on video sketching (immersive video, biometric demon, Jon's VJ'ing work).

The two key points I took home were: One, sketching seems to be more of a mindset (not being too much attached emotionally to a piece of work, readiness to change something, quickness of creation, willingness to disregard certain details) than a particular technique. Two, that rather than building sophisticated tools to support the creation of sketches it might actually be more interesting to create tools that document the process of sketching. After all, some sketches do only make sense to those people that were present at the time of its creation...