Since end of April 2015, the Sketchdrive project, financed by the Eindhoven municipality under the “Leren 2030” grant, has finished successfully.
achievements
As a result of the project we aimed for building and implementing Sketchdrive, first as a prototype, later as a beta release, that is tightly integrated in and evaluated with the specific design education environments in Eindhoven, nationally and abroad. This software will remain available to Eindhoven design education for an extended amount of time. The tool was designed, developed, and evaluated with various stakeholders in different educational contexts in Eindhoven, nationally and beyond.
Over the course of this project and beyond the funding period, this enabled us to research the use of Sketchdrive and we will determine, document and disseminate the added value of an online visual conversation to top level design education. With the Sketchdrive project website we showed the ongoing process and gained momentum for long-term benefits of Sketchdrive supported visual conversations in design. The research on Sketchdrive has generated interesting insights, but, as it is not surprising for such a fast moving and ambitious project, research is not done yet: more challenging directions have been found and will be explored.
future of Sketchdrive
Sketchdrive is online, and therefore global. The visual feedback conversations supported by Sketchdrive can be between people from different specialisations, different industrial branches and different creative cultural backgrounds. It is the lubricant of cross-sectoral and cross-cultural co-creation. Students from emerging economies who have had no access to really good creative feedback will now have that, and this feedback can come from Eindhoven. In this respect Sketchdrive not only facilitates role models and maximizes their exposure potential, Sketchdrive is the role model for a boundary-free creative education community. To be developed and tested in and pioneered from Eindhoven is a prestigious status for the education community of Eindhoven.
The research on Sketchdrive will continue in the coming months as outlined above. There are many more students joining courses right now and they all have their own opinion how it works for them, how the system could be improved and what this mean in general for design education in the 21st century.
Sketchdrive.org 