Abstract

What Do Ideas Look Like? (2026) is a small-scale publication compiling student drawings / sketches / diagrams / notations made during the Thinking Through Drawing workshop offered through UAL-wide, Central Academic Support between 2024- 2026. I propose to soft launch this new publication, a resource for both staff and students at UAL, to be deposited in the College Libraries ahead of the upcoming academic year. This workshop will be an opportunity to take part in a brief version of the full Academic Support offer, to feel similar risks students take beginning any project, and share a very easy and practical method for possibility.

Session and activities

Since 2024, I have been working on a new mini-publication, part of my ongoing research into my practice delivering the Thinking Through Drawing workshop (and its other formats: the Hope Booth, Sketching Potential, Focusing Attention, TTD in Nature) for (UAL-wide) Central Academic Support at University of the Arts London. I have compiled examples of the wide range of sketches / diagrams/ drawings/ notations students make during my workshops to share them with a wider audience. I am interested in making these tentative first steps towards new ideas visible, these rough, messy sketches will inspire others to feel more confident to try it themselves. The focus would be on presenting the work together to show the diversity and range of possibility across subjects. Messiness, looseness and the ‘unjudged’ raw sketch are key. This project involves asking workshop participants to scan or photograph and send an image made during the workshop. Responses will be grouped thematically and selected for the widest possible range of projects and approaches. This thematic grouping is not intended to give different meanings to the sketches, but as a categorisation of the type of approaches taken, of drawing process.

The opportunity to present a workshop at this Education Festival will at once provide a soft launch for the publication, as well as meet an audience of members of staff, for whom this may be a visible and practical opportunity to experience the tentative first steps of risking a new idea or direction, similar to the steps they ask of their students. An easy method, it needs only a willingness to engage, this workshop will be a space to share my decade of experience working with a broad range of UAL students from all levels and al all colleges. The publication will be deposited in the college libraries available to staff and students from the new academic year.