Digital Freehand, Creativity and Neuroscience

The close connection between reification of the human thought and hand movement is nowadays challenged by the ubiquitous automatization of most activities. Projects in architecture and design can now be directly produced inside the computer with CAD only, with no preliminary hand sketches. Such mechanistic pervasion has risen concerns in the academic world that the designer’s imagination may be dwarfed. The limited physical use of the hand could be one important cause of such a drawback. This paper reports on a novel experimental investigation, using electroencephalography, which suggests that creativity is probably boosted by the use of freehand drawing and impaired by the limited use of the hand in CAD. Different from previous investigations of ours, in this experiment the real working conditions of an architectural project were replicated. It was found that movement related electroencephalographic activity was enhanced in freehand sketching with the pen and decreased when CAD was used, providing a strong clue that higher cognitive functions, like creativity, were similarly affected.