Sketching is thinking.

Concept sketch for a package and communication design problem

Ever walk up to a while board during a work session with your team and have this urge to make a mark on that slick surface when you’re struggling to articulate a thought? You’re tentative, you’re still thinking, then the marker hits the surface and your thought crystallizes.

Why does this work? 

The “doing” (drawing/sketching/making) is the thinking, “doing and thinking are complementary” (Schön, 1983). There is enormous value in thinking-out-loud-visually and it arises out of the sheer freedom one has to think, without being confined to a formal lexicon or syntax. (1)

I imagine it to be this way: all thinking is fluid, your emerging thoughts are open to new inputs (or should be), always in the state of flux. When expressing thoughts in prose, Hemingway put it this way: "all writing is re-writing”. Your first words and thoughts suggest other words and thoughts and so on, until finally you have an idea ready for expression. This is precisely why teams must be supportive of the emergent, incomplete thoughts of their members. Thinking out loud requires patience.

So, when you make that first mark, any line, it may suggest an axis, or a time-line or the spine of a stick figure. Hereafter, that line and the discussion in the room will prompt the form and function of the next one, and the one after that. It's in this way that the very act of sketching informs thinking.  

references:

1. Shewchuk, G. (2014). Translating Domain Expertise through Visual Sensemaking. (Major research report) OCAD University

Schon, D. A. (1983). The reflective practicioner: how professionals think in action (p. 1983). New York: Basic Books.