Il tempo del disegno digitale. Potenzialità e limiti di uno strumento troppo giovane per essere già vecchio

To say drawing, as well as saying image or model, is to synthesize too many issues into a single word. What manner, method, and technique of drawing are of interest to those teaching architectural design? Drawing by hand, doing it with the computer, drawing by assembling pre-existing elements: the ways of acting to bring about an original document are numerous, and each represents within itself a vast and heterogeneous set. All of these are legitimate ways of drawing and perhaps useful in the teaching and learning of architectural design. Digital drawing is an indispensable practice: mass university no longer has the physical infrastructure and human capital required to manage student education in hand drawing. In the short semester and the few hours of design studio courses, it would be impossible to carry out a complex, multi-scale, interdisciplinary design exercise that is capable of being contextualized and truly measured against the thematic, conceptual, and physical difficulties defined by individual educational programs. These notes, perhaps useful for outlining a possible semantics of digital drawing in the pedagogical field, are aimed at investigating the structural framework of the student-computer-teacher relationship, beyond rhetoric, and aware that vector drawing in CAD is probably already part of the digital past. An attempt, therefore, to try to bring attention back to a phenomenon – vector drawing – still perhaps too young to be relegated to a segment of technological archaeology.