Drawing Practice as the Foundation of Creativity By Lefteris Heretakis
Lefteris Heretakis is a designer and a lecturer. He has been designing since the late 1990s in various roles as an illustrator, graphic designer, photographer, and art director. He began teaching in 2009 and has since developed a passion for the role of drawing in design education. In line with this, Lefteris is developing the New Art School that will provide a much-needed framework for design education in the future. In 25 years of designing and illustrating, I have always wanted my students to discover their individualised design processes. Having witnessed the decline of drawing in the teaching and learning of Visual Communication Design in higher education, I have also witnessed the work of my students becoming more similar to each other’s; except those with a deep ability to see and depict - those that see the design process as play rather than scientific dissection. In other words, the students with the best hand-heart-eye coordination are also the ones that can use the tools of design-thinking to express themselves in a clearer manner. Consequently, these are the students that are more employable and more likely to be able to adjust to the coming disruption to the design profession - artificial intelligence. The fundamental question to my students is, what can you do that artificial intelligence can’t? It is not always a question that can easily be answered in a direct way. However, the element of play; the element of doing without doing; plus the element of being in the creative state without overly specific and tightly defined objectives can contribute to the answer. It is our responsibility as design educators to augment the environment of play, by designing Art Schools that embrace joy, experimentation, music, and most of all, failure. I am confident that my colleagues will recognise the grade anxiety that overwhelms our students after 18 years of social conditioning, blocking their creativity. As educators, our first step is to embrace failure by abolishing grades. According to Alfie Kohn, researchers have found three consistent effects of using (and especially emphasising) the importance of letter or number grades: 1. Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself. 2. Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenging tasks. 3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. 58 Together we Inspire
