Recipes for Systemic Change - Helsinki Design Lab

38 ChapterThe inherent pliability of sketchesallow them to be positively reappropriatedwhen conditions orcontext change.more importantly to learn quickly from your mistakes. Theseiterations and your evaluation of them enable a transitionfrom intuition to tested strategic intent.In this sense, the working approach of strategic design isakin to setting out to bake a cake—except that the world hadnever seen such a thing, there is no recipe to follow, and youare not even sure which ingredients are in your kitchen. Onlyby digging around in the pantry do you begin to discoveruseful ingredients, and through testing and speculation youbegin to develop a sense of how your ingredients might worktogether in a recipe that yields a cake on the counter to matchthe idea in your head.Once you’ve pulled a couple mediocre attempts from theoven you begin to understand the nuances of the emergingrecipe and the importance of certain ingredients in proportionto each other. You might upgrade to a better blender thatwill help you fold a more consistent batter, or perhaps yousplurge on organic cherries because you know they will perkup the recipe. The exact specifics of your solution evolve asyou perfect the recipe and begin to understand which ingredientsare key and which need less attention. By hunting andgathering ideas, trial and error of concepts and the carefulcalibration of relationships, you’ve found the recipe for anexcellent cake.A designer calls this process ‘sketching.’ The seductivebeauty of wispy lines sketched by talented designers often getsall the attention, but at its core sketching is a way to developrelationships and details in parallel. Traditionally sketchingis used to begin a design process by allowing different formalideas to be explored in a quick and free-flowing way. Thepower of the sketch derives from the fact that it implicatesan idea without requiring that every tiny detail be specifiedjust yet. The written equivalent of a sketch is the bullet-pointoutline, but whereas an outline only makes sense when readfrom top to bottom a sketch is more open to interpretationand can be read in many different ways all atonce. This inherent pliability of the sketch makesit positively fungible, able to be re-appropriatedwhen conditions or context change.As students we were perplexed by the insistenceof our drawing instructors who requiredhours of sketching and re-sketching the samefigures and still life compositions, but the reasonwas to develop a sensitivity to scale and proportion—twoways of being specific about relativity. Sketching relationships