For her last ISOscape post, Jaslyn Ng shares her notebook of sketches, a place where she tests her ideas. “Sometimes when I’m stuck, I’ll just keep connecting the dots.”
Since university, I have developed a habit of writing notes and hand sketches on an A5 visual diary. My notes are usually in chronological order and I like to use every single inch of the notebook. I often go back and fill in the blanks when I am zoning out. There is something about the dot grid in my notebook that I just can’t resist to connect them. I often ended up with a pattern that was inspired by my surroundings.
Writing notes and hand sketches has become a process for my brain to dissect and understand excessive information. After writing words with a few annotations, things start to make more sense. I will then continue to develop the idea with diagrams, drawings or modelling. Architectural drawings and diagrams often looked deceivingly simple. They are an essential tool to communicate complex ideas into something easy to be understood by the general public.
It has been an amazing journey to put my thoughts and illustrations into the ISOscape project. Here is a peek at some of my behind the scenes, notes and sketches.
*ISOscape (short for isolation-scape) is the ever-changing new way of living, where social distancing is a necessity between individuals as a result of the current global pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19).
The ISOscape project was created and curated by Jaslyn Ng, an architecture educator and experienced senior architect based in Melbourne, Australia. This project aims to address and respond to the impact of the current pandemic to individuals, families and greater communities. This is a series of open discussions created to challenge the ever-changing isolation requirements.
