Doodling Away

My colleagues often glorify me for “thinking out-of-box” when I came up with simpler solutions to knotty design issues. In fact, I just don’t know “the box”, because I missed lots of formal education in my childhood (see About). Naturally, my brain must have adapted visual thinking. I like to draw in order to “see”.

But for years, I have mistaken my visual thinking trait as a sign of an artistic talent (LoL). In order to give “my talent” an outlet, I wedged oil painting classes into my busy schedule of work and family. But I struggled on that path, and my 90 year old oil painting teacher repeated telling me, with an Hungarian accent, “(in order to paint well) you just need to accumulate enough brush mileages, which will take many many years”. I then started questioning about my purpose of learning painting. One day in 2017, while in Taipei, my friend Mey took me to her favorite childhood bookstore. There I run into a tiny book on doodling by a Japanese author. With a glimpsing of the first few sentences, I suddenly realized that doodling is exact the vehicle I was searching for in order to transform my visual thinking!

I’ve been in love with doodling since - it helps me to brainstorm ideas, to organize a complicated inter-related world, to connect dots from chaos, to catch an imagination, to summarizing my learning. Best of all, it has helped me putting a whole new world onto paper to share with people around the world with language barriers.

Paul Gauguin once said, “I close my eyes in order to see.” He visualized a beautiful world and turned them into master pieces. And it took his lifetime to master his artistry. But with doodling, we are set free from those restricted artist disciplines, and still turn our own imagination world into our opus, so that “I see in order to understand”.