Re-Projecting the Image: A Pedagogy of Digital Tracing for Beginning Design Students

Colorado State University, Interior Architecture Department, Fort Collins, CO, USA

^* Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract

This Paper explores how tracing—traditionally a method for learning to draw—can be reconceptualized as a pedagogical strategy for engaging early design students with digital media and architectural representation. With assignments designed for two-dimensional digital media through software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, undergraduate architecture students are invited to reinterpret architectural images and photographs by “tracing” and replicating them. The idea is not to reproduce, but to re-see and re-understand design ideas of order, composition and perhaps even conceptualization through the lens of digital drawing. These exercises emphasize observation, experimentation, and awareness of the projected image, and they encourage transformation through a new, digitally mediated visual language. The process reveals how tracing functions—or the act of intentionally overlaying meaning-- can be a form of inquiry and a way to think through images—and subsequently form and space--and to encounter the limits and affordances of digital tools.