From the course: Creative Inspirations: Second Story, Interactive Design Studio

Sketching ideas

(Music playing.) (Music playing.) (Inaudible speech.) Shoam Thomas: Sometimes working digitally, thinking about space, isn't enough. Google SketchUp has the tools to really create the mass and the forms and start to get in the details, but sketches are still very important, and it's just because it makes people concentrate less on specifics and more about the generalities of what you are trying to do. It's like drawing with a big piece of chalk. You end up having a limitation, but actually that limitation makes you end up evaluating the bigger picture much better. And then you come to something like building a scale model, a great tool for us in the science museum, because you not only get to do another thing that's not on the computer, but it gives me lots of different flexibility for something like having meetings and collaborating with my teammates, and be able to do things like, maybe I just want to have this thing kind of angled, because people are going to be coming in from this side, looking through. So I possibly want to lure them in, and almost have them flow into this back staging area where we feel like that could be like a collaboration, contribution-type area. So I am getting to dream up, and that's really fun. I have always liked Google SketchUp. The tool is efficient. It can quickly generate things. You can generate mass and form, but sometimes what happens is you can also get stuck because you end up noodling things more than really exploding the bigger idea. So this is an invaluable tool to help communicate. It's all about making sure that idea that I had I woke up this morning with, I can quickly just jot that down. (Music playing.)

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