Necessity of Concept Sketches

Concept Sketches go beyond the ability to draw. It is a combination of both creativity and the ability to express things. This way, the things that we have envisioned can come to life. With the use of a pen and paper or digital pen and tablet, we get to have more freedom to create strokes and illustrate our design. It is not restrictive nor limiting, providing more room for error and excess without needing to consider dimensions and sizes.

If we take this approach in the industries that we have today, concept sketches can be seen applied in product development cycles. And so, it begs the question, why is it applied, and is it even necessary? To answer this, we would need to look at different perspectives where concept sketches can help out.

Opportunity for your ideas to materialize

As many of us experience, our imaginations and thoughts typically remain in our heads – some not getting out. Not everyone gets the opportunity to focus and sit down upon it – thinking whether it is worth pursuing. When it comes to product development, it is pretty hard to collate our thoughts if they are not written down. Oftentimes, we see think that the idea is not worth exploring, thus killing its chances to materialize. And here is where concept sketches come in because it allows you to see what you have without investing too much time and effort to do so.

Making sense of your imagination

Before stomping down on your idea, or anyone for that matter, you can try to take a perspective where you say “what if” – What if the idea makes sense? What if the idea will work? What if it can reap more benefits instead of drawbacks? These are the things where concept sketches will help out because it allows you to invest just enough time to bring it out there where you can figure out if it even makes sense or not. By getting your thoughts organized and seeing things visually, the idea becomes open for review and paves the way to pursue.

Eliminates risk and issues on product usability

If we compare the costs of building a product directly versus having a concept sketch done before design development – we may say at the onset, that the second one looks more costly because there is another processing layer that we have to go through. However, if you look at it in a bigger picture, having this process in place prevents errors and risks that you will encounter in the long run. At the early stage of the product, you can already capture where improvements could be injected as opposed to learning about them only at a later time.

Saves time and effort to evaluate

As we have mentioned, early detection of product issues is more affordable to correct as opposed to those detected at later stages. And investing in concept sketching can help save time and effort to determine the problem areas of the product. There are not many resources spent because the process is indeed meant to accommodate as many errors as possible. It provides the freedom to revise as much as needed until you get to an acceptable point.