Blind Drawing

Definition

Blind drawing is Ross T. Smith's first-week studio exercise — "a two-hour drawing exercise which happens in the first week of the semester to introduce the phenomenological approach to the studio." Its protocol: "the students are blindfolded and directed to draw a variety of sensory perceptions of reality, not objects, but feelings of a thing. The drawings are made with soft charcoal on large sheets of paper. The students sit, stand, move about, crush the charcoal, or smash it into the paper, and draw with their hands."

The exercise's target is the perfection-and-accuracy habit: "Many high-achieving students can be self-critical and intellectually judgmental of their creative abilities. Drawing by hand encourages students to let go of the perfection and accuracy which are so predetermined by CAD programs. Blind drawing disrupts the intellectual preconception and fear of 'not getting it right' that many students face these days due to a lack of hand-drawing practice." Its positive yield is the unexpected: "The imperfection of viscerally responsive mark making offers the possibility of the unexpected, where a smudge could indicate a certain ephemeral or material quality that may lead to a journey of imagining." And its outcome is a turning point: "The blind drawing exercise frees students from visually judging their drawing abilities. It acts as a significant turning point in the studio. Students use drawing to express their intuitions and ideas about design freely, in a direct and uncomplicated manner."

Its doctrinal ground: "Drawing (or any mark making) mediated by the body is a phenomenographic process of transferring thought to paper" — and "Life is a messy business; we do not live in a world of perfections and absolutes – it is one of errors and humorous mistakes."

Key Thinkers

• Ross T. Smith — the exercise's author: blind drawing as the phenomenological studio's introduction; the blindfold, charcoal, large paper, "feelings of a thing"; the disruption of CAD-determined perfection; the smudge as "a certain ephemeral or material quality"; the turning-point claim.
• Susan Hedges — the wiki's cognate drawing-concept (see waiting-drawing): the waiting drawing as "a marking of time… not an answer," made of "differences in weight, interval, and motion" — a different phenomenographic drawing that also refuses the plan's claim to answer.

Related Concepts

• Phenomenography — the exercise's category: "a phenomenographic process of transferring thought to paper."
• Experiential Learning — the exercise's context: the studio's physical, project-based learning mode.
• Waiting Drawing — the sibling concept: both drawings displace the representational answer (accuracy, the plan) in favor of a bodily marking — Smith's of feeling, Hedges's of time.
• Embodiment — the exercise's ground: viscerally responsive mark making, the body as the drawing's mediator.
• Subtle Revelation — the exercise's aim: to render the student available to subtle, non-visual revelation by removing visual judgement.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — the exercise's full description (Figures 21.2–21.3: student Tarık Şengülec, Meliksah University workshop, 2015); the self-criticism diagnosis; the CAD contrast; the smudge's "journey of imagining"; "a significant turning point in the studio."

Open Questions

• Blind drawing removes the eye to restore the body's mark — the inverse of Ruskin's "invisible body," whose eyes "replace the physical body" (see invisible-body). Is blindness then the phenomenological studio's method of last resort for the ocularcentric student, and what does its necessity reveal about what visual training has already done?
• The exercise draws "not objects, but feelings of a thing" — the felt adumbrations of a thing without its visual outline (see adumbration). Can such a drawing be used in design (as a brief, a site, a mood datum), or is its function purely diagnostic — revealing to the student their own sensory habits?
• Smith's exercise is assessed as an introduction, then superseded by "drawing to express their intuitions and ideas about design freely." Does the exercise's freedom survive its institutionalization — or does the turning point become, once ritualized, another technique students perform for the critic?