Skin and Bone

It's a start.

You know, you can recognize someone who was trained in hand-drafting techniques;  they have developed a habit of rotating their pencil while they draw, which maintains the sharpest point without having to go back to the sharpener or the pointer.  I have noticed that I do it reflexively with any graphite pencil I hold, as well as a fair number of pens and markers.

Nothing of that scrawl above means anything to any of you, of course, and nor should it.  It is a graphic note that I have made for myself, in the course of actually designing something.  It is only procedural; it will be supplanted, hopefully tomorrow, by more representative diagrams and/or sketches.  Eventually, we hope it results in a schematic design to be presented to a client.  Maybe someday, it will end up built in one form or another.  Maybe.

A while back, I started a... well, I guess you would call it a journal entry, (given that it was started prior to blogging) entitled "The pencil".  Back when pencils were something people used.  But it was supposed to be a reflection on how pencils, and marking instruments of all sorts, at the end of this one appendage became a way to speak, to reflect, to express myself.  And sometimes it was crayons, or charcoal, or markers; sometimes carving knives and in recent years, computers.  I found that the ability to use a pencil, allowed me to express myself, to communicate, but even more, it became an avenue for mental processing of concepts, a part of thinking.

For me, the mark of a design tool is how much it disappears while you design.  Most computer programs fail miserably at this, requiring you to spend too much of your wetware processing power in considering the computer interface that you stop thinking about what you actually should be designing.

Most of my designing has been about these stupid bags of bones and slop that are walking around.  In college, I had a wonderful class called "Architecture and Human Behavior" and most of my fellow students hated it, as a distraction from aiming at that 'starchitect' status.  I loved it quite a bit, and although I did not so well at it, grade-wise, it made me conscious of the human element to the work I wanted to do  (and of course, I did not become a Starchitect).  But I committed myself to more in depth exploration through my studies and in my latter professional days.  To me, the interface between humans and the built environment is not only intriguing, but it has always seemed to me to be the only reason to build things.

Back to the pencil.  Most of my notebooks in grade school and high school had a marked similarity; they would have a class title, and perhaps a lesson title;  then they would have a couple of lines of notes, which then morphed into a cartoon or an excellent illustration of spaceships.

Put a pencil in my hand, and I draw.  In meetings with clients, I need to draw to explain concepts.  I draw upside down if I need to.  Pencils, crayons, markers, sticks in the dirt.  I draw.  I sketch.  I illustrate.  It's not only part of the design process, its part of my mental process.  Even now, all these years later and when commerce demands more, my meeting notes are still a mix of text and sketches.  Hand me a piece of paper, and I will draw on it.

The pencil.  It comes in all forms; soft (HB) and hard (4H) and everything in between.  I have a mass of Prismacolor markers that I use to design and to do presentation renderings; in recent days  Sharpie has come up with a fine range of colors that are enticing.  As some of you may have seen, big blunt soft charcoal and pastels are my favorites.  Lines and arcs, smudges and points, and soft, high tooth paper.

One day, as we were preparing for bed, my wife gasped.  "What happened to your hands?"  and I was oblivious.  Looking at my hands, I saw they were peppered with colored dots and discolored by the markers I had used that day in my design efforts.  I never realized, because I was focused on the design I was working with and an errant Prismacolor hitting my hands went unfelt.  Because, you know, why would I care?  But I understand why it might be alarming to a loved one; "Why is your melanoma so colorful?".

When I am designing, or preparing a presentation rendering, my preferred media is markers, with colored pencil augmentation.  Over the years, I have worked to loosen my style, for what it's worth.  It's still one of my favorite things to do, and I do not get enough opportunities to do it.  I have heard from more  than one person in the local design community that my renderings are very recognizable, which is kind of weird, but also kind of gratifying.   But when I do them, I get those marker prints all over my hands. Actually, I can kind of tell how productive I have been, from a design standpoint, by how messy my hands are.

Back to that pencil.  I still have some good old pencils sitting in my design tray, and sharpeners sitting adjacent.  Today, I managed to carve out a little bit of time to start some design efforts, one of which you see up there.  But there were a couple of pencils in that tray (and not those stupid mechanical pencils) when I started, and the design work did not really start to flow until I started sketching guide lines using them.

And while I am  more-or-less conversant with computer design tools, and completely appreciative of the power that they afford us as designers, I cannot help but wonder if if they are the best way to design a human-oriented built environment.  I have worked with a lot of young folks adept at the digital design, and I am concerned that the human element is lacking.  Putting digital people into your design does not make it humane; but thinking back, I guess Archigram already proved that.

So anyway, tomorrow I go back in, and pick up that damn pencil again. And with any luck, it can complete that old circuit, and we can make something flow, something happen.

That pencil.