After our recent classes’ discussions on art vs. design, I started to think about design in less traditional sense, and how in many fields that lie beyond our typical definition art, this process of “design” begins with some sort of sketch. A sketch in a traditional sense looks something like what we see below:
It’s typically a black and white drawing done in pencil, but in other fields, this sort of idea of a rough “sketch” is also quite common. For example, consider a “wireframe,” shown below:
Wireframes, are basically a black and white “blueprint” for a website or a mobile application, sometimes done by hand on paper and other times done using applications like Figma. Some other fields I noticed that have analogous “sketches” are architecture, when architects have to plan a building’s schematics, or business, where entrepreneurs often have to submit design patents (that contained detailed drawings) to ensure their product isn’t copied.
The similarities between all these “sketches” really struck me. It reminds me a lot of the distinction between design and art, and how design tends to be about solving a problem in many cases. Because whereas the sketch of the eye shown above doesn’t solve a problem, the wireframe, the blueprint, and the patent all do. It’s a subtle difference, but one I found really interesting!
