Empowering non-designers through animation-based sketching

This paper asks whether it is feasible and valuable to facilitate early stakeholder involvement in the design process by applying animation as a common temporal sketching language. We build on the notion of sketching as an efficient activity for designers to think with and communicate ideas through. Not much research has sought to involve non-designers in the sketching process and assess which sketching media might be suitable for this purpose. We present the findings and learnings from a one-day workshop of using animation-based sketching techniques with non-designers as a way to empower them in the early concept exploration phase. We then discuss whether animation could be a suitable mediator of the sketching mind-set in stakeholders with varying preconditions for participating in the early exploratory phase of design.