I haven’t added to my Manifesto for Growth in 7 years, but I think this #30 “Get a Drawing Pad with Digital Pen For Computer” is a worthy add.
We bought Wacom One pads for all of us engineers, and we place them in front of our key boards for easy access to markup an email/PDF/word doc etc just like sketching on a pad.
We have been using for 6 months now and here are sketches I did last week
In #27 of this manifesto “sketch poorly and sketch often” also applies to computer pads…
Drawing quick sketches is essential to being able to make informed engineering decisions. Drawings help us determine which elements are relevant and which may be safely ignored. These daily hand sketches are needed to help us make subtle discriminations about proportion, member orientation, constructibility, connectivity, etc. So we need to sketch and sketch often, but do we need to sketch well? No. Sketches should only meet one criteria - they need to be useful. They need to communicate a design intent and to help with decision making about the design. Feel free to sketch well as a hobby - by all means - add water color even, but for daily engineering, sketch poorly and sketch often.
In fact, you can even sketch without any consideration of craft and it will still be useful.