UP Feit
Marcel Breuer Doctoral School of Architecture University of Pécs
Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

The emergence of the digital tablets around 2010 as an alternative to the laptop originated a technological revolution in the relation with users and the information technology. The development of specific drawing applications for these new devices has meant an unexpected new implement for today draughtsmen.

Throughout History, engineers have invented machines that have been used by “creators” of several disciplines. All of the need a minimum learning in order to make gestures automatic, without interfering the creative process.

Photographers, journalists, writers etc. do not have the same relation with machines. Many writers confess themselves unable to text not only a phrase on the computer but to write even on a conventional typing machine. Writers  such as Gabriel García Márquez, on the other hand, have never mixed tool and writing. Nobody has questioned so far that the quality of his literary work has been somewhat different before and after the computer aided process.

Drawings on digital tablets would be somewhat in relation with to photography. The unlimited repetition of what is being drawn does not interfere the artistic appreciation of the photographer, whose original work was previously registered on a negative and now in the captor of a digital camera. In the same way, the importance of a digital drawing should be valued in itself, not considering the possible repetition of the result.

Nowadays it seems that students of Architecture are less and less interested in freehand drawing and are more interested in new technologies that in some cases, tend to generate rather passive attitudes.

Drawing on a graphic tablet could also be a good complementary method for learning, an educational exercise to stimulate freehand drawing among students in order to be more familiar in front of a blank sheet of paper and follow afterwards their own way, being able to draw on whatever field, either traditional or graphic.