Learning by drawing. A conversation on hand drawing when education is going digital

The paper displays a conversation between the two authors. They reunite after ten years since the international summer school Around the Wall, which they co-organised and run in Lucca (Italy) in 2012, to reflect on hand-drawing education, mainly through their experience in teaching in different design environments. The conversation tells about how that summer programme represented for the authors the first steps to test some learning strategies that later on fed their teaching approaches, one at the BA in Design at Universidade da Madeira (PT) and the other at the BSc in Product Design at Politecnico di Milano (IT). In particular, Around the Wall summer school focused on hand drawing as a tool of personal discovery, reflection and visual communication, serving each phase of a design process. Also, the summer programme provided the participants with a multicultural and multidisciplinary environment to encourage a sense of collaboration and stimulate creative thinking. Over the ten years of teaching drawing within different design curricula, the authors encountered various teaching challenges and requirements to respond. Hand drawing education at the Design BA at Universidade da Madeira follows a horizontal approach. The learner is provided with many hours to experiment with different exercises and techniques to identify and develop a personal style for visual communication. At the Design BSc of Politecnico di Milano, the approach is vertical. Here the teaching aims at optimising the few hours dedicated to drawing so that learners can effectively develop their skills and methods for drawing by hand within a product design process. In the context of a design education moving faster toward digital learning environments - especially forced during the lock-downs in 2020 and 2021 - the authors reflect on their personal teaching experiences to identify educational guidelines for using hand drawing as a creative tool to learn to communicate, in any field. Finally, the authors conclude their conversation by imagining some future teaching/learning scenarios as a cross-pollination result between their personal experiences and considerations.