Doodling to Learn

I'm always looking for new work, especially these days when I'm stretching to find new ways to work: no longer "just" a writer, in recent years I've become a science writer and an illustrator, and even -- sort of -- a designer, by default, as real (i.e. employed) designers look at my dummy pages with an assurance, or horror, that they're best done by the brain that thunk 'em up.

Sometimes when I'm looking for new work I do up a little marketing thingy for myself, and I was preparing one of these, making it to help scientists better understand what I do when I interview them and turn them into the subjects of blogs or articles or Humanimal Doodles. I needed some pull-out quotes for the marketing thingy, so I asked Beth Lindstrom, the editor of Odyssey, the science magazine in which Humanimal Doodles appear regularly.

Along with saying other friendly things, Beth mentioned that she thought my science comic went along with the principles at work in Felice Frankel's Picturing to Learn project. I hadn't heard of Frankel and her work, so I went to look, and what I found seemed to affirm everything I've been trying to do lately -- from letting go of formal thinking (by this I mean purposeful, goal-oriented, organized thinking), to trusting your mind to take a concept you've been learning about and synthesize a new form -- a visual form -- for it (by this I mean a doodle, and so does Frankel), and to use this doodle as a show-and-tell for what you know as well as what you want to learn, and then to share the whole thing.

This links up with the work I've been doing this summer with my writing and drawing, thanks to Lynda Barry and Writing the Unthinkable (see my last post for links), practicing Lynda's methods for taking yourself out of your formal mind and into the dark waters of the less conscious, disorganized, deep-process part of your head. This is the place I try to take myself to as I write, draw, or design -- and what's coming out of my fingers (yes -- fingers, "the original digital equipment", much more than keyboard) has been different, interesting, and empowering.

Frankel proposes that, through doodling, people learning science target what they know, form it into pictures showing relationships, and set processes in motion. Through her classroom work she has shown that people shown doodles learn more, and has created a program to inspire students to create their own doodles. I'm hoping to learn more about her work.

Electrifying News About Humanimal Doodles

It's a rainy Sunday here at the Doodling Desk -- all the more reason to share the sunny, newest Humanimal Doodle in print, the Vespa Doodle. As with all my Humanimal Doodles, this one, just published in Odyssey magazine's May issue, covers news about what people are learning from animals -- in this case Vespa orientalis (that's its page at the Encyclopedia of Life, where eventually every known species will have its own page). Vespa orientalis is the Oriental hornet (or wasp). Scientists have discovered that its body acts as a little solar cell, turning sunshine into electricity.

But you know me: just say the name of a wheeled vehicle and I'm likely to drop it into whatever I'm writing or drawing. So of course when I realized that the source of the name for those nifty little motor scooters you see in European cities (and once in a while in New York or Boston or Bethel, Connecticut) was the Latin word for wasp, I jumped right on it -- on the doodling, of course, not the Vespa, alas. (I'd like a robin's egg blue one, although the orange one in that link is sweet.) I plopped a scooter right into the doodle. For me, that's part of the fun of doodling for me -- the freedom to free-associate in pictures.

I've been doing these Humanimal Doodles for almost a year now, since posting the Walrus Doodle during a trip to the Arctic Ocean. They've appeared in print and on the web (as on the World Wildlife Fund site in that Walrus Doodle link.) The Vespa Doodle is the sixth one that has appeared in Odyssey. In the works: doodles about mitten crabs, Alvin the submarine, and laboratory mice.

Here's the Vespa Doodle: