Thinking about engineering drawing and Dudley zoo

One way of thinking about linear motion is based in engineering drawing. This is a way of thinking about line rarely explored by drawers outside of engineers and the people who spend their lives tinkering with machines. The transfer of one type of movement to another is though fundamental to ideas related to agency and the effect one thing can have on another. In order to transfer linear to rotary movement you need to be able to link the two together. In the case of the diagram above it is the rod attached to the crank that links the two movements and in the rack and pinion diagram below the teeth locate in order to transfer circular to linear motion. 

Rack and Pinion used to transfer circular movement of steering wheel to lateral movements of wheels.

Rotary movement of pedal transferred to linear movement of chain, which in turn will be transferred to rotary movement of a wheel. 

A crank can be used to convert circular motion into reciprocating motion, or conversely turn reciprocating motion into circular motion. Without this idea, we would not have motors. The slider-crank mechanism is a design which converts rotary motion into linear motion, which is achieved by connecting a slider and a crank with a rod. In the case of a motor the slider is the piston.
The use of pistons in motors is fundamental. The piston is attached via a piston pin to a connecting rod, which in turn is connected to the crankshaft. Reciprocating motion is a repetitive up-and-down or back-and-forth linear motion, and it is this that is converted into rotary motion. All of the thinking about these issues can be done diagrammatically and engineering drawing helps us understand how these forces are related. 

It is the way engineering drawing allows you to think that is interesting. Alan Fletcher, the designer and co-founder of Pentagram said that ‘thinking is drawing in your head’.  This area of drawing as a problem solving device is sometimes seen to be more the province of designers rather than artists but I would beg to differ and think that drawing is always thinking and that what we sometimes fail to do is articulate what sorts of thinking it allows us to do. By allowing us to see the essential relationships between things, we can understand how one element can possibly effect another. Engineering drawing strips away inessentials and allows you to focus. I would argue that this is as useful to a fine artist as it is to an engineer. 

When the steam engine was invented and the conversion of rotary to linear motion became  central to the development of industrial revolution, no one at the time noticed that what we were also doing was launching an assault on the world's ability to cope with carbon emissions. We are now aware of how global warming is causing us to totally rethink our relationship with the planet and many fine artists are attempting responses to this awareness. The power of engineering drawing to unleash the anthropocene, the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment, can perhaps be harnessed by artists to help visualise alternatives. 

Many years ago when I was teaching evening classes in drawing, I was approached by one of my then students, who was also a professor from the engineering department at Bradford University. He was attending my classes because of his interest in the approach to drawing as a problem solving tool that was being taught in the then named Jacob Kramer College. He wanted to see if I could transfer my teaching style into one suitable for engineering students. (Jacob Kramer College was the name for Leeds College of Art from the late 1960s until early 1990s) I then went over to Bradford and devised a series of drawing sessions for engineering students that were all based on ideas relating to motion transfer, students having to devise ways to transfer motion around corners, through narrow gaps, over and around obstacles etc. I was getting the students used to different technical drawing systems at the same time, so I would ask them to devise the overall idea as a 3D visualisation and use engineering drawing inserts to explain details as to how particular issues were being overcome, such as how precision could be maintained when a particular sequence of movements were needed. There were a vast amount of transmission possibilities and the work done was exciting and led to some very interesting solutions. We would also make simple models to see how things might work, again the relationship with model making within an art context was useful. (Compare with ideas from this earlier post) 

Using a pulley system to transfer motion from one plane to another

Each process allows you to think. A model can be made to show how something might look or to demonstrate how something might work. Just as verbal language can be descriptive or poetic, drawing can be geometric and mathematically driven or a language of the emotions. Perhaps at its most interesting though is when it combines the two. I am exploring the possibilities of working from the architectural drawings of Dudley Zoo (see previous post) and combining these images with more emotive renderings of the animals that would have been put into the Modernist animal enclosures. 

I would suggest that even a doodle allows us to think, perhaps to help us undertake a certain type of displacement thinking, one that both saves us from more anxiety and which can tap into the unconscious in order to release imagery that may stimulate new ideas for more conscious consideration. The great thing about drawing is that it can flow between various modes and as it does it provides us with the most refined thinking tool. A thought can begin with a very basic sketch, as in the two drawings below by Buckminster Fuller and Joseph Paxton, but as the idea develops it may become very clear that what is coming into being is magnificent. 

Buckminster Fuller: Sketch 

Buckminster Fuller: Technical drawing of tensegrity structures

Joseph Paxton: Initial idea for the Crystal Palace

Joseph Paxton: Technical drawing of the Crystal Palace

If drawing is seen as thinking, it is often a mixed form and can be a combination of annotation and visual representation. Leonardo's sketchbooks being perhaps the most perfect example of this. 

Leonardo: Page from a notebook

Perhaps this year could be a time to take stock and to think more deeply about how you use drawing to think about ideas. I shall try to make this a firm resolution for myself and as my latest series of drawings develops perhaps spend more time reflecting on how the various elements can be used to communicate differing types of information. 

If a drawing can also be a way of thinking about analogies, what types of ideas could be opened out in relation to the visualisation of the transfer of motion? In particular I would like to consider how in my next body of drawings to further develop the ideas in drawing as the trace of a touch, or how one thing can have effect upon another. 

Dudley Zoo: The idea and the reality

The idea of circular or rotary motion that is embedded within this drawing, was one that simply led to a lonely bear walking beneath a rising ramp. But what was underlying this was an aspiration for humanity to rise above its present condition. The transfer of motion in this case being one between drawing and its concrete realisation and the idea of a modernist aspiration. This transfer of idea being further transferred by myself to an allegory about the reality of human designs on the planet. The designs for this bear pit were using the shape of the existing landscape. In Dudley the outcrop of limestone that that castle was built upon, was one that had been heavily mined during the previous two centuries and the area was riddled with natural and man made caves. Therefore the bear pit had within it actual cave entrances which were blocked in as the pits were constructed. This fact was something as a young boy I was always fascinated by, I wanted the blockage of the caves to somehow collapse and allow the bears access to the labyrinth of caves that honeycombed Castle Hill and the adjacent area of the Wren's Nest nature reserve. But what did the bears think about this? 

Seven Sisters Caves: Wrens Nest, Dudley, 1950s

A book to read that might help you think about thinking:

Fletcher, A (2001) The Art of Looking Sideways, London: Phaidon Press

See also:

A link to how to do basic engineering drawing

More thoughts on technical drawing
Drawing as abstract notation