RISK IN OBSERVATION DRAWING AS A STRATEGY FOR FIRST YEAR DESIGN STUDENTS, AT ESMAD

Abstract

One of the challenges in the current context of higher education is student involvement, commitment and effort; even those who, due to the nature of their study area, are inclined to learn by doing, as in the creative areas and, in particular, in Design. This article addresses an interdisciplinary pedagogical experience between the curricular units (CU) of Drawing Techniques for Graphic Design (TGD) and Drawing Techniques for Industrial Design (DTID), with the ideation, development, and use of a dice (conceived with the students) as a way of sorting out the design constraints, both in terms of time and in terms of typology and objectives. The quick sketches, with scribbled, continuous, straight or curved lines and blind drawings, tested by the shapes cast on the dice, are a response to the risk, to the challenge that is promoted by the creative process, in this experience that anticipates and rehearses the design project, in its constraints, hand in hand with pragmatism in its hesitations, with the need for resolution in a limited time. The student, when throwing the dice (in a feeling of certain control within a playful process of luck and chance), foresees the need to be open to risk and error – a disposition that exercises creativity, something positive in the context of the Design process and visible in the results of this pedagogical experience, specifically: in accelerating growth in Drawing, in the

acuity of observation, in the control of technique, in the synthesis of the essence of the observed referent. It allowed progress in the domains of communication of gesture, expression and intellectual training which, like a line on a sheet, draws a bridge between author, referent and observer. It also translated into freedom and overcoming the fear of making mistakes, embracing it and assuming it as a form of learning in the classroom context.