Sketching 101: exploring the solution space
Tags: Design Process, UX, Sketching, UX Design, Sketch

For the first 8 years of my design career, I was a self-taught designer. I think I was also someone who used his intuition a lot. One of the things my intuition told me to do, was to sketch. A lot! Later, when I actually went to design school, I got a much better understanding of why, and a better vocabulary to describe why sketching is such an important design tool. At least I hope my vocabulary is better — you, the reader can be the judge of that.

A sketch vs sketching

Okay, so obviously a sketch on paper is a visual thing. It can be used to show your ideas to others — to communicate. But I would like to differentiate between a sketch, and the act of sketching. The process of sketching.

When you create a sketch, you don’t just transfer the contents of your head onto paper. Unless you’re Nicola Tesla, who apparently did. For the rest of us, our ideas are usually very fuzzy with only a few details. The image actually gets sharp, and the fuzzy edges actually get sharp through the process of sketching. To put it another way: the act of sketching is not a transferral of ideas from brain to paper. It is itself an act of creation. That’s my first point.

The solution space

Sketching plays an important role in the exploration of the solution space. Which is to say, in the exploration of all the possible solutions to a given design problem.

Metaphorically, I like to think of this exploration as standing in a dark room, shining a flashlight on to the floor. The first sketch makes idea #1 visual and concrete. But it also illuminates other parts of the solution space —it brings other stuff into the light: other ideas kind of just emerge. Ideas that you had not thought of before. The term for this phenomenon is emergence, and in my opinion this is the most ingenious aspect of sketching.

As you sketch, more ideas emerge through the process of sketching

Why is exploring the solution space important?

The most common ideas are easy to come up with. Less so if you want to come up with good ideas, or even novel ideas. That takes more leg work! Again, I have a metaphor I like to use, which is that common ideas are kind of just lying around on the ground. Everybody can see them, and all it takes is for you to just bend over and pick one up.

You gotta dig a little deeper if you want to find the good stuff!

But is that what you want? Isn’t the purpose of designers to solve problems in the best way they can, rather than just do the first thing that comes to mind? “Hey, let’s build an app!” — No, let’s not. Let’s think of something better, shall we? And that’s where sketching comes in.

You have to go on a treasure hunt, and find those treasures that are somewhere in the dark recesses of the solution space. Sketching is the ideal method both because it is an act of creation, and because emergence will happen. In other words, sketching will contribute to fully forming your idea, and more ideas will emerge because of it, which you can then build on to come up with even more ideas. It sets the sparks flying!

Thanks for reading!

I’m passionate about sketching and prototyping. I think these aspects of a design practice are among the most important and enjoyable. I hope you found something worthwhile in this article, and that you have a good weekend! :) If you want to support my writing, you can do that on Ko-Fi