Abstract
This track gathers eighteen papers that consider the work of the sketch and sketching in a moment of accelerating cultural and technological change. Across three sessions: (1) Sketching for Thinking, Expression, and Information; (2) Visualising Narratives; and (3) Sketching & Generative AI, the authors examine analogue, hybrid, immersive, and AI-augmented practices to reveal how design sketching is evolving and rendering the seen and the unseen, the personal and the cultural, the speculative and the practical. Building on the conversation begun at DRS 2024 conference, this year's papers address cultural specificity, decolonial and feminist methodologies, narrative-driven generation, and the pedagogies that prepare designers to negotiate design agency within human–machine (AI) collaborations. Sketches are quiet, but indispensable. This year's papers offer the design research community fresh language and evidence for thinking about the futures of sketching not only as a skill, but as a relational, situated, and increasingly distributed mode of inquiry.
Keywords
digital sketching; analogue sketching; visualisation; visual generative artificial intelligence; design education
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.203
Citation
Howell, B.F., Hoftijzer, J., Muñoz, M.N., and Scully, A. (2026) Sketching Futures: Cultural Dimensions, Pedagogies, and Digital Transitions, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.203
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Sketching Futures: Cultural Dimensions, Pedagogies, and Digital Transitions
This track gathers eighteen papers that consider the work of the sketch and sketching in a moment of accelerating cultural and technological change. Across three sessions: (1) Sketching for Thinking, Expression, and Information; (2) Visualising Narratives; and (3) Sketching & Generative AI, the authors examine analogue, hybrid, immersive, and AI-augmented practices to reveal how design sketching is evolving and rendering the seen and the unseen, the personal and the cultural, the speculative and the practical. Building on the conversation begun at DRS 2024 conference, this year's papers address cultural specificity, decolonial and feminist methodologies, narrative-driven generation, and the pedagogies that prepare designers to negotiate design agency within human–machine (AI) collaborations. Sketches are quiet, but indispensable. This year's papers offer the design research community fresh language and evidence for thinking about the futures of sketching not only as a skill, but as a relational, situated, and increasingly distributed mode of inquiry.