Thinking through Drawing 2012 was an interdisciplinary symposium on drawing, cognition and education held at the Wimbledon College of Art from 12-14 September 2012. It focused on ‘Drawing in STEAM’ as this quotation from the organisers indicates.
‘How is drawing used within and between STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths)? What is the relationship between drawing practices in the Arts and in STEM subjects? What is our current understanding of drawing, cognition and learning, and how is it contributing to curriculum development and instructional design in these areas?’
Ken Baynes and Eddie Norman wrote a paper in order to contribute to the symposium entitled Modelling And Designerly Thinking : STEM to STEAM, which can be downloaded here. All the papers presented at the Symposium (including this one) can be accessed here.
This paper was written before Ken Baynes’ book Design: Models of Change was published and filled in some of the background to it.
Interestingly the presentation was recorded in two ways.
- It was video recorded and an edited version was published on Vimeo
- An artist, Yoon Bahk, recorded the key messages being communicated as shown in the Figure.
They make an intriguing comparison … there’s what Ken and Eddie intended to say, what Eddie actually said (Ken was not able to attend the Symposium) and what Yoon Bahk thought Eddie said, which has guitars included, so the key message clearly came over accurately!
Thinking through Drawing has now moved to a new website International Drawing & Cognition Research and they are organising a one week intensive courses in New York in July 2014. LDP was delighted to be able to support their work in 2012 and will be please to continue to do so. Clearly, our existing titles and some future ‘Big Books’ are addressing closely related research agendas eg
Graphicacy and Culture: Refocusing on visual learning by Xenia Danos (available now)
Visual Literacy: Prompting change in art, design and environmental education (available 2015)
If you visit International Drawing & Cognition’s website, then you can download Yoon Bahk’s Scribing Publication which not only includes her drawings relating to the 2012 Thinking Through Drawing Symposium, but also her notes on Scribing, as well as other contributions.