Affording Design, Affording Redesign - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 86

wild, unusual, and weird, but they suit needs, fit goals, satisfy constraints. Thus,
creativity has two components: divergence and convergence.
Divergent thinking expands, each connection leading outwards to many more.
Convergent thinking contracts, drawing connections across the divergent ones.
Either of these processes quickly exhaust the mental workspace. There is an ancient
solution: expand the mental workspace to include a physical workspace, put it in
front of the eyes instead of behind them. One of the most flexible cognitive tools is a
sketch or diagram. Just as a stick lengthens the arm, a sketch broadens and expands
the mind.
Sketches externalize thought, enlarge the mind, force abstraction, provide a
playground for exploration of new ideas, make ideas visible to self and others.
Sketches are a natural tool for designers as they map the parts and relations of what
is to be designed onto the space of a page. Sketches can be tentative and vague,
expressing and suggesting many possibilities. Think of the amount the mind can
hold at one time as a mindful. A sketch can hold several mindfuls, allowing
designers to see far more than they can imagine, allowing designers to integrate
mindfuls. As they emerge, sketches give feedback to designers: is something
missing? do the parts fit together? does it make sense? how could it be otherwise?
how could it be better? Sketches can be enhanced, especially in conversation, with
talk and gesture, primarily iconic and deictic gestures. And, a boon for researchers,
sketches provide data for those who wish to study design.
Externalizing ideas onto paper has benefits beyond extending the mind. Paper
provides a space, a space we can be organize and reorganize to suit our needs, just
as we organize physical spaces. Just as the physical organization of the spaces we
inhabit inside and out serve our memory and our actions, the organization of a
sketch serves memory and anticipated action.
Externalizing thought is by no means limited to design of objects and spaces.
Sketching fosters design of the abstract as well as design of the concrete, sketching
to imagine business organizations or processes as well as sketching to imagine
objects and their uses. The space of a page, like the space of a room or a field,
invites structuring. In the abstract case, a set of ideas, a page invites structuring and
representing those ideas as parts and relations. Space itself carries meaning. Some
of those meanings are expressed in gesture and words. Common gestures, like
thumbs up, common expressions like “top of the class” or “falling into depression”
are indicative of a rich set of associations to the vertical. Up is more, higher,
stronger, most likely because going up requires overcoming gravity, which in
turn requires age, strength, health, and power. Nothing as dramatic as gravity
distinguishes the horizontal dimension, which is uniform in all directions around
us. However, biology and culture confer some degree of asymmetry to the hori-
zontal dimension. Most people in the world are right-handed, and there is some
support for the influence of handedness at least on judgments of value, associated
with greater dexterity and fluency of action. But cultural inventions, notably
writing, seem to confer broader and stronger correspondences. In languages written
left-to-right, left is earlier, more powerful, first, and motion that goes rightwards is
faster. The opposite holds in languages written right-to-left (Tversky 2011a ). The