Sketching Plans

After read Kaplan and Sullivan last week, this week’s reading from Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences reminded me even more of the idea of a writing process. As a composition teacher, I am constantly talking to my students about their processes and encouraging different steps for them to take, whether they are prewriting strategies, data gathering, drafting strategies, or techniques for revision and/or proofreading.

So Buxton’s section on sketching reminded me of the prewriting and data gathering steps of the writing process. His sketches – because he suggests that many are created – are very similar to the  freewriting stage for our freshmen composition students. We tell them to write, and write as much as they can, and then go back and pick out what works. This relates to the “quick” and  “plentiful” attributes (111). We tell them to not worry much about details, just get the form and fill in the rest later. Here we see the “minimal detail” and “ambiguity” attirbutes (111-2). And we tell them to throw out what doesn’t work. Obviously, the “disposable” attribute (111). Then we tell our students to get feedback on what they’ve written – either through conferences, group/peer review, or workshops. And here we have Buxton’s idea that the sketch should be open enough to get suggestions and feedback from others, whether they are on the design team or role-playing the part of the user.

One problem I had with this reading was the ceramics class analogy on page 141. The students in a ceramics class were divided into two groups, and one half of the class was graded on quantity while the other was graded on quality. The result was that the students who were creating just to fulfill a quantity ended up with pieces that had the highest quality.

While this analogy would seem to support Buxton’s ideas on sketching, it sort of subverts it. For starters, Buxton says that as designers, we should not jump in and start creating, but that we should sketch. In this analogy, the students do jump in and start creating right away, without any plans or sketches. Second, the fact that the quantity students had the highest quality because they were “busily churning out piles of work –and learning from their mistakes” (141) implies that they were drafting their works, not just creating sketches (which is arguable in itself). There were no rules against the quality students sketching and reworking their pieces, but the analogy implies that they didn’t. Since they ended up with “little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay” (141), that only implies that the students were procrastinators. Again, there were no rules against reworking, so if those students had started work right away one their one piece, they too could have learned from their mistakes and created higher quality pieces. This would have illustrated Buxton’s point more strongly, because this would have been analogous to creating sketches and making them disposable, while the quantity students need to keep all of their work, making it not so disposable.

Overall, this section was helpful to me as a composition teacher. This semester, my students must create a multi-modal project. The assignment I settled on was for them to create a three minute video which is essentially a presidential ad campaign for a fictional character. Thanks to Buxton, I can more clearly explain to them why a storyboard is necessary for such an endeavor. Not only will it serve as a sketch for their video, but as Buxton says, it is cheaper, easier and more timely to create many sketches than it is to create a video and then go back and edit it (299).