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What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

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Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#131

Post by jdietrich »

theoh wrote: post #126
jdietrich wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

draftsmanship (noun) 1) the art or craft of a draftsman 2) the skill of drawing Draftsmanship refers to both technical and artistic drawing skill.

Come on, mechanical drawing and 'artistic' drawing are totally different skills. The best technicians, with the highest level of mechanical drawing training and experience, wouldn't be able to draw a portrait. RISD asks applicants to draw their bike as part of the application. It's tough because both originality and observational skills are needed (google "risd bike"). But OMG it is important to realise that being ab…

I'm not saying that they're the same thing, I'm saying that the word "drafting" applies to both. Art history books frequently make reference to the draftsmanship of an artist like Da Vinci or Dürer. The words "draft", "draw" and "drag" have the same etymological root and all three are partial synonyms.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#132

Post by egypturnash »

amyjess wrote: post #86
jdietrich wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Giotto story is almost certainly a myth. It's also largely irrelevant; anyone can draw a perfect circle in two seconds with a pair of compasses or a piece of string. There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days , not years. Becoming a confident and capable draftsman is a skill that anyone can learn to a surprisingly high degree of proficiency i…

> There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years Maybe for some people, but not everyone. I have developmental dyspraxia, a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder. I'm never going to be good at anything that requires fine motor control. Maybe at best I could get the first few strokes of a drawing to look good, but after that it's going t…

Uh. I'm a professional artist and my handwriting looks about like the bottom half of the sample most of the time, unless I am explicitly focusing on making each letter look pretty.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#133

Post by blahedo »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #129
jdietrich wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude. Teachers like Betty Edwards and Bert Dodson have proven that pretty much anyone can learn to draw to a high standard in a remarkably short space of time once they understand the visual principles of effective drawing. Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifeti…

> Completely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude. I always felt this was an argument against what you are saying. Tracing doesn't require much fine motor control because you can rest your hand on the paper and go over the existing image with very small strokes. For example, try drawing the simplest of all…

> try drawing the simplest of all forms: a straight line

My high school algebra/geometry teacher, Fr. Arnold Perham, taught me this crucial skill almost 30 years ago and I use it frequently still and teach my own students how to do it. The trick: put your chalk/pencil/marker at the start of the segment; then look at the other end of the segment and keep your eyes there; and then draw the line. It's like magic.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#134

Post by tabtab »

lev99 wrote: post #11

There seems to be two things tested in this exercise. Technical drawing capabilities and knowledge of bicycle mechanics. I assume most people that drew bicycles have ridden one, but there are a few basic common mistakes. The location of the pedals (closer to rear wheel, very near to floor), the way the chain operate, and the triangle frame are some examples. I did not notice anyone drawing details around the gear mec…

Re: this exercise highlights a great amount of ignorance around bicycles. I purpose society would benefit from better bicycle education.

You don't have to understand or remember technical details to ride a bike: you just hop on and go (once you learn to ride). It's not like you have to rebuild one every time you hop on: they pretty much stay as they are. Let's not invent problems that are not real problems.

Sure, it's good to know how to lubricate, maintain, and inspect a bicycle, but even such an education won't necessarily make one remember the physical location of all the parts from raw memory.

I suppose in an extreme case the bar between the peddles and the back tire could just fall off, and a typical rider wouldn't notice it's missing until something bad happens. But this is probably a one in a million event such that it's not worth hours of education to prevent. It's like meteor insurance. People tend to skip inspections out of laziness anyhow, even if trained.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#135

Post by jdietrich »

amyjess wrote: post #86
jdietrich wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Giotto story is almost certainly a myth. It's also largely irrelevant; anyone can draw a perfect circle in two seconds with a pair of compasses or a piece of string. There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days , not years. Becoming a confident and capable draftsman is a skill that anyone can learn to a surprisingly high degree of proficiency i…

> There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years Maybe for some people, but not everyone. I have developmental dyspraxia, a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder. I'm never going to be good at anything that requires fine motor control. Maybe at best I could get the first few strokes of a drawing to look good, but after that it's going t…

There are a number of excellent artists who have cerebral palsy or tetraplegia. If you have limited fine motor control, you can paint or draw in large-format using gross movements. If you shake or twitch, you can work in mosaic, collage or pixel art. If you can't grasp objects, you can use a typewriter to make pointillist drawings.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#136

Post by jacobolus »

jdietrich wrote: post #59
jacobolus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like moving the goalposts. You also don’t have to draw “free eye”. There are plenty of tools you can use like tracing paper, photographic references, coloring books with the lines already drawn, ... None of my illustrator friends use french curves or compasses to do their sketching, and usually even skip using a straightedge, but through practice can make very nice straight lines, right angles, circles, ot…

Most people can accurately trace a line drawing, but can't accurately copy it by eye. Try it for yourself and you should see that your manual dexterity isn't a meaningful bottleneck in your ability to draw. Drafting tools might well be a crutch, but they were considered essential in the days when engineering drawings and technical illustrations were routinely done by hand. If you need to use a spline to draw smooth c…

By the same token, if you need a computer to draw [this or that] so what? Or for that matter, if you need to hire a trained draftsperson to do it, so what?

> Most people can accurately trace a line drawing, but can't accurately copy it by eye.

Yes, tracing a line drawing has much more direct feedback. The correct line is right there, and there is no need to synchronize imagination with hand movements. (Untrained people are still very slow and error-prone at tracing though, compared to professionals.)

In a similar way, people have an easier time playing a piano tune if you directly show them which notes to play on a physical piano a few at a time right before they press the keys themselves vs. if you let them hear a whole tune and then try to play it from memory a few minutes afterward.

That doesn’t make piano playing an “almost entirely audial skill, with almost trivial mechanical skills” involved.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#137

Post by toomanybeersies »

I'd be interested to see this broken down by country. Do Dutch or Danish people draw more correct bicycles than Americans?

Another interesting thing would be to see if there's any reason why people draw bikes facing left or right. I feel like for me it's natural to draw vehicles facing right, so they'd drive in the direction that you read in. It seems that most of the drawings here are in the opposite direction. The cycle lane signs in New Zealand also face to the left [1].

[1] https://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/traffic-control-devices-m...

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#138

Post by chii »

jdietrich wrote: post #127
nadavr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this is where it gets interesting. I suspect the author of the (wonderful) book linked above would suggest that 100% of the pictures would be recognizable as a _picture of a tree_ -- a form which we all learn by age 5 but which does not actually correspond to a physical tree much, if at all.

Exactly. We don't learn to draw the tree we see out of the window, but the idea of a tree . Children don't really draw - they write in pictograms. We teach them icons that represent things, but we don't teach them how to translate seeing into drawing. The bicycle drawings show how quickly that habit of drawing the idea of a thing breaks down. We falter when we try to draw something that we haven't learned the "correc…

> The bicycle drawings show how quickly that habit of drawing the idea of a thing breaks down.

That's because the idea is vague in most people's mind. The don't really care (and they shouldn't need to of course). Ask a bike engineering to draw it, and they will be pretty accurate. However, the people whose idea is vague doesn't know it's vague, which is interesting, and I guess that's the point of the article.

In fact, this translates to much more than drawings, but for all facets of any complexity. You often hear people claim that a particular problem is easy, "just" do X!

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#139

Post by salty_biscuits »

atourgates wrote: post #109
salty_biscuits wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2wd on a bicycle is just plain silly. Weight and friction are such huge disadvantages to overcome. Even on a mountain bike extra traction from the front seems like a very limited benefit. I think Yamaha and Ohlins made a hydraulic motorcycle 2wd prototype. There the loses and weight aren't such a big deal. My understanding was that the extra material you have to add to strengthen the suspension sort of negates any we…

I think you're right, though 2wd eBikes might be different. Our local trail association currently uses a Rokon: https://www.rokon.com/ - for trail maintenance, and it's just about perfect for that application. I could imagine them replacing it with a 2WD eBike at some point.

It really depends on center of mass and friction coefficient. Most cycling situations are wheelie before wheel slip. Even on dirt and up a hill the rider can just shift their weight backwards to get traction. A powered bike is probably different, with lower center of mass.
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