Speculation, Intention, and Imagined Lives: Design Drawing Games and Qualitative Research

In the introductory paragraphs of his seminal essay on draw­ing, “The Necessity for Drawing: Tangible Speculation,” the late Michael Graves describes a game reminiscent of the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse, a “conversation through draw­ing” where participants take turns developing a plan drawing based on a “commonly held, but never made explicit” set of guidelines (Graves, 1977). The result—in multivalent marks on paper—includes proposals for ordering devices and systems, interpretative fragments, and dichotomies of completion/ incompletion and passage/rest. The guidelines of the draw­ing game support the give-and-take, the ebb and flow, of the exchange as a kind of purposeful graphic conversation as well as a partnership. Underscoring the speculative nature of the collaboration is the need to maintain an ambiguity of scale that, for Graves, allows the work-in-progress to be simulta­neously understood as the plan of “a room, a building, or a town plan.” So long as the drawing can support multiple inter­pretations, there is the possibility of exploring a multitude of What-if questions but, once the ambiguity of the drawing is lost, the game is over.

Volume Editors
Jasmine Benyamin, Kyle Reynolds, Mo Zell, Nikole Bouchard & Whitney Moon

ISBN
978-1-944214-28-9