Mind in Motion

by Barbara Tversky

  In using drawing as an empirical method of inquiry, Leonardo has not been alone. Although Goethe was a wordsmith, renowned for his novels, plays, and poetry, he was also a drawer. He believed that his drawings, not his words, best expressed his thoughts. He loved nature and everything in it, in and of itself and as allegory. Like Leonardo, he believed that nature revealed its function through its form, and that drawing was the way to discover both. He, too, was taken with similarities of form, suggesting similarity of function.

  We know the artist Paul Klee through his endlessly inventive and playful paintings, but Klee was fascinated by motion, and many of his drawings were studies of movement, ways to capture its essence and understand it. The contemporary artist Gemma Anderson has adapted the drawing techniques of Goethe and Klee, cycles of looking, thinking, telling, and drawing, as tools of discovery. She works with teams of biologists and topologists and other scientists to understand forms and their formation. These projects both advance science and create art, in the form of drawings and sculptures, a double boon.

  DRAWING TO UNDERSTAND AND LEARN

  Leonardo’s techniques aren’t just for rare geniuses or sophisticated scientists. Drawing ideas on a page works well for understanding science for ordinary people, including kids. Studies of our own showed that when science students create visual explanations of scientific phenomena, they understand and learn more than when they create the verbal explanations typical in classroom situations. Here’s how we know. Junior high students were first taught a STEM concept, a rather difficult one, chemical bonding. They were taught in the usual way, through a textbook and through classroom lectures and discussions, both with ample visuals. Immediately after learning, their knowledge and understanding of both the structure of the molecules and the process of chemical bonding was tested. The students were then divided in half; half made visual explanations and half verbal explanations. This was followed by a second test of knowledge and understanding. The first surprising finding was that both groups improved in the second test, without any intervening teaching or learning. Students increased their knowledge and understanding simply by creating explanations. The second impressive finding was that those who created visual explanations showed far greater improvement than those who explained in words. Here are two of the visual explanations, one in Figure 9.1 and another in Figure 9.2. You will quickly see that these are creations of the students’ minds, they are not copies of the diagrams and other visuals they saw in their textbooks or the class lesson. You also see delightful metaphors, sharks grabbing electrons or stick figures gladly giving them. They are woven into a narrative, a story of a process. Here, as before (and after), it’s the depiction that’s important even if the words aren’t always legible.

  FIGURE 9.1. Student’s visual explanation of chemical bonding.

  FIGURE 9.2. Student’s visual explanation of chemical bonding.

  Now we are free to speculate why creating visual explanations led to better comprehension and learning than creating verbal ones. The first part should be familiar to you: mapping processes in the world to the space of a page is more direct than mapping to words. A diagram has other benefits. It provides a check for completeness, are all the parts there? It also provides a check for coherence, does the diagram make sense? Most likely, Leonardo’s practice also rested on these three features of creating sketches: directness of mapping, check for completeness, check for coherence. And a fourth, a platform for inference.

  DRAWING TO CREATE

  The truth is, sketching for thinking, alone or together, now, in the era of cheap paper, seems to be everywhere. There’s the proverbial cocktail napkin, the one grabbed spontaneously in the conversations of scientists, football coaches, engineers, inventors, mathematicians, stage designers, architects, business innovators, and patent attorneys, to list just a few. Here’s one headline: “Everything you ever needed to know about investing, scribbled on cocktail napkins.” You can find websites and books that collect cocktail napkin drawings and other websites and books that tell you how to draw them and use them. You can enter yours into a contest. The Architectural Record has sponsored a contest for the best cocktail napkin sketches since 2010. There are science labs that use drawings and diagrams systematically to keep track of their progress, theoretical as well as empirical, with ? that denote the unknowns in the processes, the questions for future research.

  Architecture and design rely on drawings. Drawings are the plans, the road maps, the instructions for constructing the buildings and objects. In practice, architects, engineers, product designers, and others depend on a range of different kinds of drawings and photos and simulations, annotated in different ways, depending on their intended use. Drawing serves as a thinking tool for designers and engineers, a way to work vague ideas into concrete ones as well as a way to check the coherence and feasibility of the ideas. Designers are said to have conversations with their sketches, cycles of thinking, drawing, looking, rethinking, redrawing, and so on, gradually refining a design. The conversations can be observed and studied by asking designers to talk aloud as they design or retrospectively and linking the thoughts, the drawing, and the looking throughout design sessions. Because the designing itself is for the most part interactions of the eye and the hand and the marks on the page, retrospective reports work better, as they do not interfere with the design thinking. The reports of the designers reveal fascinating aspects of the design process.

  We wanted to capture that process as it unfolded to shed light on its underpinnings. To that end, two experienced and seven novice architects were asked to design a museum on a hillside to hold a hundred paintings plus a sculpture garden, ticket office, café, gift shop, parking lot, and more. They were filmed as they sketched. One of the design sketches appears in Figure 9.3. You can see that it is schematic and blobby; the structures and the layout are vague, in short, ambiguous. Ambiguity turns out to be one key to creative thinking because it allows, even encourages, reinterpretations. Abstraction plays a similar role for a similar reason. After the design session, the researcher went through the videos with each designer, asking what they were thinking each time they put pencil to paper to make a mark. The reports were painstakingly coded segment by segment for the content they were meant to represent: shapes, spatial relations, functional relations, background, and more. Segments with the same content were linked even when separated. Designers reported the general ideas they were playing with and the insights and changes in ideas they had as they worked.

  The expert designers differed from the novices in two striking ways: whereas most of the observations and insights of novices were about perceptual relations, far more of the experts’ reflections were about functional relations. In addition, far more of the experts’ reflections were linked to other reflections. Perceptual relations are those directly apparent from the sketch itself, a shape or pattern or motif. Functional observations require inferences from the sketches, often animating the sketches. They cannot be read directly from the sketch, for example, the flow of traffic or the light changing throughout the day or year. This difference, that novices can see and work with what is present in sketches and diagrams and other visualizations but that it takes talent or expertise to use diagrams to imagine things that are not actually in them, is key to expertise. It characterizes expertise in other domains, like chess, engineering, and music.

  Designers often report that they draw for one reason, and that when they look again at what they’ve drawn, they see new things. They make unintended discoveries in their own sketches. That is, they reinterpret their own sketches, a phenomenon encouraged by the sketchiness of the sketches. In fact, we were able to catch many unintended discoveries. A detailed analysis of the protocol of one expert revealed that unintended discoveries tended to occur when the architect regrouped elements of the sketch, when he saw new patterns, when new organizations emerged. Perceptual regrouping stimulated a virtuous cycle: regrouping led to new insights and new insights led to regroupin
g. Look at the sketch of one experienced architect in Figure 9.3. It is full of ambiguities, and it is those ambiguities that allow reorganization and new insights and discoveries. The highly rectified outputs of computer programs do not lend themselves to new interpretations.

  FIGURE 9.3. Architect’s early sketch of a plan for a museum.

  To test that idea directly, we developed a task that ordinary people could do. We designed ambiguous sketches, those in Figure 9.4.

  FIGURE 9.4. Sketches shown one at a time over and over to participants to generate new interpretations.

  We showed each sketch over and over to undergraduates, asking them to come up with a new interpretation each time they saw the sketch. Half the participants were told that regrouping the parts was a good strategy for finding new interpretations. The other half was simply told to look carefully. We counted the number of new interpretations they reported until they gave up. Afterward, we asked them what strategies they used. Participants, like children and even adults, don’t always do what they’re told. Some of those instructed to regroup the parts didn’t, whereas some told to look reported regrouping the parts. So, we regrouped, separating the participants into those who reported regrouping the parts and those who didn’t. In fact, the participants who reported attending to and regrouping parts found nearly twice as many new interpretations as those who did not attend to parts. They also persisted longer as well, presumably because attending differentially to parts provided a useful strategy for generating new interpretations.

  A follow-up study showed that experienced designers were more adept at finding new interpretations than ordinary people were. That led us to study effects of ability in addition to expertise. In yet another experiment, we found that two abilities predicted number of reinterpretations. The abilities themselves were unrelated. One was the ability to detect an isolated figure of a specific shape in a larger more complex configuration, a test called embedded figures. That skill is perceptual, requiring scrutiny of parts. The other was the ability to find remote associations among words, for example, what word is associated with widow, bite, and monkey? Spider. Or sleeping, trash, and bean? Bag. Or duck, fold, dollar? Bill. That ability is verbal or associative, requiring divergent thinking. On the one side, a perceptual skill, on the other, a cognitive skill. The first, bottom-up, the second, top-down. The two skills are integrated in what we have called constructive perception, that is, reconfiguring an external representation in the search for meaning. Possessing either skill increased the number of new ideas, and possessing both skills doubled the benefits. Constructive perception seems to be the key to a successful conversation involving the eyes and the mind and the marks on a page.

  In later work we tried other strategies to encourage new interpretations. Interleaving the sketches with each other rather than repeatedly showing the same sketch increased production of new ideas. Interleaving or spacing presentations of the same sketch presumably allowed new associations to emerge, a phenomenon related both to incubation and to release from fixation, effects well known in creativity and problem solving. Interestingly, spaced practice is also better for learning than massed practice more or less for the same reason.

  Reconfiguring parts is a bottom-up perceptual strategy. Because constructive perception involves both a perceptual and a cognitive skill, we reasoned that a top-down cognitive strategy should be effective at increasing the number of interpretations as well. As before, participants were presented with each sketch many times and asked to come up with a new interpretation each time. One group got the bottom-up instructions. They were told to reorganize or reconfigure or regroup the sketches to see them differently in order to think of new interpretations. Another group got the top-down instructions. They were told to think of new domains, new settings, new kinds of objects or organisms in order to think of new interpretations. In this case, only the top-down strategy elicited significantly more interpretations than the no-strategy control participants. We think this is because ordinary adults have extensive top-down knowledge, so it is relatively easy for them (us) to generate new categories, new events, and new settings and to use them to reinterpret the objects in various contexts. However, ordinary adults are unlikely to have had extensive practice and experience deconstructing and reorganizing ambiguous sketches. Hence ordinary people could easily adopt the top-down strategy but wouldn’t be as adept at using the bottom-up strategy. The bottom-up strategy is using the world in front of the eyes, on the page. The top-down strategy goes from the page back into the mind, with its vast store of people, places, and things and categories and transformations and networks and strategies, all of which can be activated to generate new ideas. We stay in the mind as we find the key to creativity.

  CREATIVITY

  Leonardo, architects, designers. How about the rest of us? There are many occasions where we need to improvise. A shoestring rips, an ingredient for a recipe is missing, the handle of a suitcase falls off. Improvising means finding a way to solve the problem, quite often with a substitute object, a safety pin or paper clip for the shoe, vinegar instead of lemon for the recipe, rope for the handle. A new, unfamiliar use for a familiar object. Finding new uses for familiar objects is a warm-up activity in design classes, like scales for piano or slalom courses for soccer. Like others, we turned to that task to see whether we could find strategies that would enable people to find more uses and more creative uses. We’ve left sketches in the world for sketches in the mind.

  It seems that we can’t escape our zeitgeists. Two key elements of early twenty-first-century zeitgeist poke their heads into research. Innovation and mind. Everyone and every country want to be innovative. Some even use dropping out of Harvard as a strategy—look what it did for Bill Gates! And everyone wants to boost the mind. Some legally, some not. Any article or show mentioning mind attracts immediate attention. It could be mindfulness or it could be mind wandering; either way, people latch on and try, without seeing the contradiction. Preview: the key to both innovation and mind is perspective taking. You’ve noticed that perspective is another of my obsessions.

  There is a bundle of research claiming that mind wandering is great for creativity. It has been shown to increase the number of new uses for familiar objects. If only it were true, this would be good news, just what we always wanted (dreamed about)—daydreaming is good for us. Tell that to the baseball coach. Or the fifth-grade teacher. Okay, maybe it makes sense that mind wandering could increase the number of ideas people have. After all, mind wandering can release thinkers from fixation, from going around and around in the same rut, a problem we’ve all had and one that experts have too. Letting your mind go as it pleases, taking a break, going for a walk, all help by bringing in new associations, some of which might provoke new ways of thinking. But there’s no guarantee that the random associations of mind wandering or world wandering will be relevant or productive. Mind wandering might get you out of a rut, but it doesn’t get you back on track. It doesn’t give you a good strategy for finding new solutions.

  I once asked Paul Andreu, the visionary architect of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and more than forty stunning airports and public buildings all over the world, “Where do you begin?”

  “Inside,” he said.

  What he was saying is that he begins with you. You need to be uplifted by the space you are in and you need to be guided effortlessly to where you need to go. As a designer, you must begin with what you cannot design. You begin with the human (or other creature) who will use what you design. Design firms (like IDEO) that work on real-life projects like water purification in remote areas or cheap fuel for emerging countries or redesigning a shopping cart or an electronic device use what they call a human-centric approach to design. Let’s call it empathetic design. They study a community of users intensively to see what people actually do and what kind of new product or service might improve their lives, fit into their lives, and be sustainable. An empathetic perspective does provide a productive search strategy:
think about people’s lives, take the perspective of users.

  We compared those two strategies, mind wandering and empathetic, for the standard divergent thinking task, finding new uses for familiar objects. We pretested our objects to make sure that people could find new uses for them. Our experiments used an umbrella, a shoe, a broom, a chair, a flashlight, and a smartphone. Participants were asked to find as many new uses for each object as they could. The mind-wandering group was told to let their minds wander. The empathetic group was told to think about ways that people in different occupations—gardener, artist, fire fighter, and so on—might use the object in new ways. In other words, take their perspectives, each a different one. Because those roles are well known, it wasn’t hard for participants to put themselves in the others’ shoes. Both groups were told, truthfully, that the recommended strategy had proven to be effective. We added a control group that was not given a strategy.

  The hands-down winner was the empathetic perspective. The mind-wandering group was no better than the control group. In fact, many in the control group told us they just let their minds wander. Both perspectives appeared to provide strategies to release thinkers from fixation, but only the empathetic approach gave a productive way to search for new uses. Taking other perspectives led people to suggest more new uses and more creative new uses. Creative uses were those that only one or a few people came up with. Some examples: using an umbrella for shish kabob skewers or jewelry; using a shoe as a bird carrier or sound-proofing; using a flashlight as a meat tenderizer or martini shaker. As befits a chapter that begins and ends with art: the most productive perspective was artist! Artists can make art out of anything.