Opinion

The focus on the hand and on manual methods in the process of developing unseen images in Design and Art, has become increasingly important again in the past decade. More interesting than the speculation and forecast of the aesthetic tendencies is the investigation of how this methodology is different to the creation of images in the process of photography or of generative images created with computer code?
It seems that the terms emotion and conceptual blending, as defined in Neuroscience, can providing a base to critically assess the processes of drawing and therefore of manual design. We can hypothesize that drawing involves many physical reactions, which are outside of our field of consciousness and can’t be addressed verbally. With specific drawing experiments we can approach those hidden processes.
If we trace for example the line of a perfect mathematical ellipse, the process will have the goal to reproduce the line as close as possible. Therefore the goal of the motor apparatus is to correct the hand movement as soon as the the pencil has left the line to be traced. The result of this process can be described as a shaky, hesitant and insecure line. 

On the other hand we can draw an ellipse also by generating fine lines out of a fast arm movement. In this process of overlapping tentative lines a definite dark line appears and has a completely different meaning compared to the traced line. The freely drawn line can be interpreted as decisive, vivid and harmonious.
We can infer, that even so emotions are not accessible verbally, the decisions made on the emotional level are guided at least by the physical abilities of the human organism – by the coordinated movement of arm, hand and fingers. 
In regard to conceptual blending the example of the traced line shows a specific form since the mental image is materialized as the original drawing. In the process of the freehand drawing the drawer is continuously blending a mental image with his or her marks on the paper. 
As far reaching conclusion of this drawing experiment we can say that the deliberate use of an individuals’ unconscious decisions and their correlation to the conceptual blending is specifically pronounced in the manual design processes. This emphasis makes manual design processes more dependent on one individual, where as design processes depending on technical tools are more influences by collective decisions.