However at any time when Thompson has a brand new concept, his go-to technique for sketching out the idea isn’t a CAD program. It’s a doodle with pen and paper.
“Doodling stimulates your thoughts,” says the famend engineer. “Despite the fact that we’re within the digital age, I preserve a bit of paper and a pen by the mattress, and when my thoughts begins reeling with concepts at 3 o’clock within the morning, I rise up and write them down so I can put it again to relaxation.”
“One night time it is perhaps an idea for a lounge chair that’s additionally an ergonomic surroundings. The subsequent it’s concepts for a high-altitude rocket airplane.”
“Typically it will be a fast idea that is nearly fully incoherent as a result of I’m nonetheless half asleep, however it serves as a reminder to me of the performance of what I need to design,” he explains.
Doodling stimulates your thoughts
For Thompson, the advantages of doodling are multifold. “It opens up your thoughts to artistic pondering that you could be not be capable of do sitting in entrance of a pc. A CAD program may be very restraining, it’s going to restrict you,” he acknowledges. “Whenever you’re free-thinking on a doodle, you’re not being cautious about screwing it up. You’ll be able to simply draw one other one subsequent to it, or seize a brand new piece of paper.”
Relating to his favourite paper for doodling, Thompson says that he’s completed a few of his finest doodling on napkins. The truth is, he refers to simply about any hand-drawn idea as a ‘serviette sketch.’
“I’ve at all times known as it the serviette sketch as a result of normally it’s an concept that’s in your thoughts if you’re speaking with colleagues over lunch or wherever, and there’s not at all times a bit of paper, however there’s at all times napkins round,” Thompson says with a smile.
A treasure trove of fascinating real-life tales, he goes on to explain how the B-2 Stealth was first conceptualised with serviette sketches by a then-colleague named Irv Waaland at aerospace firm Northrop, which the crew steadily developed right into a profitable pitch for the thought, together with a tabletop mannequin that Thompson created.
He additionally describes how the Purple Bull Stratos trajectory and capsule had been initially conceptualised with doodles on bar napkins. He’s nonetheless acquired an early sketch of the capsule completed on a beverage doily – and retains it framed in his house.
Felix Baumgartner on the controls within the completed capsule
© Joerg Mitter/Purple Bull Content material Pool
The Purple Bull Stratos capsule being ready for launch
© balazsgardi.com/Purple Bull Content material Pool
Leaping from the capsule at a record-breaking altitude of 38,969.4m
© Purple Bull Stratos/Purple Bull Content material Pool
Relating to methods to get higher at doodling designs, Thompson has some suggestions:
“First, simply do extra of it,” he recommends. “Additionally, preserve your drawings bigger somewhat than smaller. One mistake folks make – and that is in illustration additionally – is that they’ll have a giant piece of paper, however they’ll draw one thing very small within the nook. Don’t be afraid to be daring about your concepts.”
And he doesn’t attempt to make it good from the get-go. “Typically doodling is a really fast, common define of what you are pondering. You’re attempting to visualise actually rapidly what the overall form or idea is, and from that, you’ll be able to go to a different piece of paper – and even draw on prime of the doodle you’ve acquired – to begin refining it right into a bit extra formulated concept. And from there you’ll be able to take your serviette sketch and give it some thought in 3D on the pc. That works for me,” he says.
Don’t be afraid to be daring about your concepts
At this level in his profession, Thompson’s doodles have contributed to the whole lot from his aerospace ideas to metropolis monuments and improved kids’s teething toys. Recently he’s been serving to firms brainstorm concepts for house planes and options for mapping the ocean ground. The busy Californian can be an avid artist who does life drawings, portray and sculpture – and his art work, too, begins out as doodles.
“The serviette sketch – the doodle – is the spontaneous flash in your thoughts of, ‘I understand how to unravel that downside.’ And on the similar time, it’s your notepad which you could replicate again on, or share with a design crew, to consider what you need to create,” Thompson asserts. “It truly is the lightbulb.”
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