MIT is starting up a design center to be located in the old Metropolitan Warehouse. One of the directors on the engineering faculty has done a lot of research o

MIT is starting up a design center to be located in the old Metropolitan Warehouse. One of the directors on the engineering faculty has done a lot of research on how designers work, especially early stage design. When the center was profiled in Tech Review last year, she noted that sketching (including on paper) still has a role to play: Among other things, Yang has found that the very existence of those visual representations matters greatly: designers who do even basic, preliminary sketching consistently generate more design ideas. As she and a coauthor wrote in a 2007 paper, there is “an important interplay between a designer’s ability to sketch and their ability to visualize in their heads or through prototypes.” She has even found that if designers aren’t highly skilled at drawing, that doesn’t affect the quality of their final design outcomes; it just matters that they draw at all. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1063906/design-central/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1063906/design-c... Whiteboarding also falls into this realm ... not paper, but it enables the act of sketching without a digital intermediary.