The Magic of Drawing by Hand in the GenAI Era

Have you tried Uizard or Relume? Maybe Stable Diffusion? What about some of the more well-known AI tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney? With a new AI tool emerging each week, they can be hard to keep on top of. However, there is something timeless that continues to be a vital part of our design process that is often overlooked: a doodle, a scribble, a drawing. 

While digital tools offer efficiency and precision, there’s something uniquely powerful about putting pen to paper. But how does drawing fit into our constantly evolving toolkit? And how can we bolster new tools with this historic skill to supercharge our design process?

Amplified Creativity

Hand sketching and drawing have an unparalleled ability to amplify creativity and unlock new, innovative ideas. Since the drawing of a horse on the wall of a cave in Lascaux more than 10,000 years ago, humans have used drawing to communicate new ideas. By breaking the bounds of a grid or the typestack of a design system, sketching offers a free-flowing space where ideas can evolve rapidly and organically without constraint. With so much product design following best practices and looking more and more alike, sketching gives back the freedom to try something new and take risks. It’s only a drawing after all.

Research in cognitive psychology suggests that drawing stimulates new neural connections associated with creativity and increases grey matter in the brain. By translating abstract thoughts into scribbles, designers gain new perspectives and insights. Drawing allows for the rapid exploration of multiple design iterations, allowing for more experimentation and innovation. Testing these early allows us to waste less time in finding the right idea faster.

The act of drawing not only activates the parts of the brain that enable better aesthetic senses, but also helps create deeper connections between different parts of our brains. This cognitive enhancement allows designers to be more aware and understanding of a problem, while also leading to more intuitive and creative thoughts and solutions. Beyond its immediate impact on design, drawing can also help individuals at risk of cognitive decline, such as those with Alzheimer's disease. 

Also at a time where remote and hybrid working are becoming the norm, drawing can also foster a sense of mindfulness and relaxation—much like the ancient art of Shodo, where drawing is seen as meditation and a way to enhance attention and focus whilst creating peacefulness and relaxation. This highlights that it is the act of drawing itself that helps unlock the idea, not the straightness of your lines or the roundness of your circles.

The Art of Iteration

Solving problems is a huge part of a designer’s skillset. Hand sketching facilitates rapid iteration, enabling designers to quickly test and refine ideas. Unlike digital tools that often emphasize polish and perfection, sketches embrace imperfection as part of the creative journey, sitting in the sweet spot between a finished visual and a crude wireframe.

Through sketching, designers can explore a wide range of design solutions without the constraints of software limitations. The nature of a sketch encourages divergent thinking, allowing designers to generate a multitude of ideas before converging on the more promising ones. You are also unconstrained by an artboard. Sketching helps free you up to think more holistically about an experience across multiple touchpoints and environments.

Sketches can also invite collaboration and communication between multidisciplinary teams. With McDonald’s, we used drawing as a workshopping activity that helped put everyone on the same page. By sharing rough sketches at the outset of the design process, we gathered early feedback and iterated more quickly. We tested our findings with customers rapidly as well as allowing the broader team (not just designers) to be more involved creatively, from Tech, Design Systems, Accessibility and Research.

Augmented Doodling

As artificial intelligence continues to advance, we are always exploring new ways to integrate technology into the creative process. AI-powered tools such as generative design and neural networks can complement traditional hand sketching by giving us the space to think and have more fun creatively. The ability to feed this into AI can also help develop and refine our ideas much quicker than ever before. 

You may have seen an Airbnb demo from 2017 that used AI to take a few simple sketches, reference design system components, and create code out of them. There’s now a plethora of tools that allow you to speed up your process in the same way. Where sketching allows for moments of reflection, and time away from a screen, AI can help accelerate the development and refinement of those ideas, and designers can maintain the quality of the output. By combining familiar and creative parts of the design process, like sketching, into AI, we can enjoy the process, get key stakeholders involved earlier, and create better work.