Overcoming the fear of making a crappy sketch

This paper discusses which freehand drawing skills a designer needs in the 21st century and why not more people are using sketching as a creative tool. Are design schools teaching the adequate skills needed today? In the past 5-10 years focus has shifted from product design to experience design and the skills needed to make high end drawings might not be needed to the same extent. 3D computational tools have in many ways replaced the classical freehand renderings, yet product designers are many times taught drawing in classic ways. In this paper, different types of drawings are categorised in order to show their benefits over 3D renderings or text. By doing this, I will show that the low fidelity drawing in many ways have more advantages than the high fidelity drawings. Even though low fidelity drawings are effective, many designers are afraid to draw or show their drawings as they lack confidence and consider themselves poor at drawing. By teaching students to identify the actual function of the drawing, they will better understand the value of a simple sketch and find confidence to use it.