Michael Gough, like many other creative types, was one of those schoolkids who couldn't stop doodling. "I've been in trouble all my life because I'm actually a compulsive drawer," says Gough, head of experience design at software giant Adobe. "In class, if I didn't draw, I couldn't focus at all."
As he got older, drawing remained an integral part of his life. This isn’t the case with most of us. From their earliest years, kids are pushed to embrace the written word as the medium for exchanging ideas and information. After preschool and maybe kindergarten, drawing is downgraded to an extracurricular activity. And so drawing becomes "doodling"-- a term that implies a frivolous activity.
For Gough, the idea that drawing is something reserved for art class couldn't be more wrongheaded. So too is the notion that only those who "can draw" should. Drawing is as essential as writing, he says, as a way of communicating and most importantly as a way of thinking. Everyone should draw, and no one should feel shame when they do. "Drawing might be as important a form of literacy as reading or writing," Gough says. "You imagine something you wish was true. And you find ways to make it true."
I talked to Gough a few months ago at the TED ideas conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Adobe was showing off its first venture into hardware: an internet-connected stylus and ruler for drawing on an iPad. Today, the company released these tools to the public, along with new drawing apps for Apple's iPad tablet. Gough believes these new products---which he helped create---can further his "drawing as literacy" mission. Digital tools, he says, have the power to help people overcome the most deeply ingrained obstacle to drawing: shame.
Unlike writing, which is taught through rote practice until kids are "good enough," drawing and drawers are rated early in life according to talent, a designation that typically falls into one of two categories: "can draw" and "can't draw." As any email exchange or Facebook update shows, talent isn't a barrier to writing, or considered one.
But how many times have you seen a co-worker stand up in front of a white board and apologize for not being able to draw before sketching a concept? Somewhere along the way, the cultural notion becomes deeply inscribed that those who have been taught to believe they can't draw should feel embarrassed when they have the nerve to try. "There are as many drawing styles as there are drawers," Gough says. "Everybody's creative. It just gets beaten out of them."
The power of digital drawing to break people out of this shame cycle, Gough says, lies in its deep erasability. Ink on a page becomes an instant artifact, a mark that can't be taken back. Not so on a tablet, he says. "A digital line never has to be permanently committed."
It helps that Adobe's new appd offer tools designed to make anyone feel like they "can" draw, even people who, like me, see themselves as non-drawers. Lines and rectangles quickly are transformed into multi-point perspective. The stylus, called Ink, and the ruler, called Slide, work together to build shapes, textures, and environments. A tap of a button on Ink's three-sided aluminum body sends drawings to Adobe's cloud, which takes on a magical quality when you set Ink down on another tablet and it instantly reproduces the same drawing, as if the pen itself contains what it has drawn.
Most important to Gough in reconnecting people with their innate ability to draw is reconnecting them with whole parts of their brains he believes are neglected when visual intelligence isn't cultivated. Drawing, he says, is a form of "abductive reasoning," the least precise but also most open-ended form of logical inference.
Instead of reaching for one right answer, Gough says, "you activate the parts of your brain that let you think all the way around a subject." He sees this kind of grasping through drawing as a crucible for creativity and new ideas. Opening up minds to the kind of thinking that drawing makes possible isn't just about personal fulfillment, either. In an increasingly automated economy, drawing and the thinking behind it are still distinctively human--and humanizing --activities. "Machines," Gough says, "don't dream."
