From Mind to Paper: Design Thinking Through Drawing Workshop

What if your most powerful design tool wasn’t software—but your pencil?

Join Bradford J. Prestbo, FAIA—architect, author, and educator—and David Damon, AIA, Global Higher Education Practice Leader at Perkins & Will, for a hands-on, high-energy workshop that brings freehand sketching back to the center of design thinking.

Built around exercises from Prestbo’s workbook From Mind to Paper: Enhance Design Thinking Through Drawing, this interactive session shows how sketching helps you think more clearly, generate ideas faster, and communicate design intent with confidence. Participants will actively draw architectural elements, materials, spaces, and concepts while learning how sketching fuels creativity, rapid ideation, problem-solving, and visual storytelling.

Designed for architecture students, emerging professionals, faculty, practicing architects, and anyone passionate about architecture and the built environment, this workshop is practical, engaging, and immediately useful—whether you’re designing, brainstorming, or simply exploring architecture through drawing.

Participants Will:

• Build confidence sketching architectural ideas quickly and clearly
• Learn practical techniques for drawing spaces, materials, and key architectural elements
• Use sketching as a tool for ideation, iteration, and clearer communication
• Strengthen the connection between drawing and design thinking

Learning Objectives

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Apply core drawing fundamentals, including line quality, proportion, perspective, and composition, to create clear freehand sketches.
2. Accurately represent architectural elements through guided exercises.
3. Use hatching, shading, and texture to convey materials, light, depth, and atmosphere.
4. Use freehand sketching as a dynamic tool to brainstorm, refine ideas, and communicate design intent.

What’s Included

• A copy of From Mind to Paper: Enhance Design Thinking Through Drawing by Bradford J. Prestbo, FAIA
• A sketch pencil and AIA notebook

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher The American Institute of Architects