Digital Drawing as Structural Thinking: From Archive to Magnetic Join

Digital Drawing as Structural Thinking

From Archive to Magnetic Join

By this stage of the project, drawing was no longer a speculative activity. The combination of archival research, early prototyping and material testing had already imposed constraints. Digital drawing became the place where those constraints were negotiated, tested and, in some cases, resisted.

The aim was not to design finished objects, but to develop joinery systems that could survive translation into material reality.

Drawing as Problem-Solving

I use Procreate as a digital sketchbook rather than a presentation tool. Its value lies in speed, repetition and revision. Drawings at this stage are provisional — a way of thinking through force, alignment and proportion rather than resolving surface or finish.

The joinery research drawn from G-Plan, Ercol and E. Gomme sources informed this process, but not in a literal way. I was not interested in reproducing specific furniture joints. Instead, I focused on extracting underlying principles: how joints manage stress, how components lock or resist movement, and how clarity is achieved without unnecessary complexity. These principles were then abstracted and reworked through my own sculptural language.

From Furniture Logic to Sculptural Form

Furniture joinery is designed to solve practical problems: load, repetition, repair and efficiency. Sculpture does not share those priorities directly, but it does share an interest in structure, balance and legibility.

In the drawings, I began to explore how the logic of furniture joints might translate into sculptural connectors that operate at a different scale and with different expectations. This meant exaggerating some elements, simplifying others and allowing space for ambiguity where furniture design typically seeks certainty.

The introduction of magnets complicated this process further. Magnetic joins require precise alignment, but they also introduce an element of unpredictability. Force is invisible, and trust becomes part of the system. These considerations were built into the drawings from the outset rather than added later.

Digital Translation and Constraint

Once initial ideas were established in Procreate, drawings were taken into Adobe Illustrator. This shift was significant. Illustrator does not tolerate ambiguity. Lines must close, measurements must resolve and decisions become fixed.

Preparing designs for laser cutting forced early confrontation with tolerance and alignment. Shapes that appeared viable in sketch form quickly revealed weaknesses when reduced to vector lines. Corners that looked strong on screen became fragile in material. Negative spaces that felt generous became structural liabilities.

This process was deliberately iterative. Files were adjusted repeatedly, not to perfect them, but to understand where the limits lay.

Designing for Failure

An important shift occurred during this stage: I stopped treating failure as something to be avoided and began designing for it instead. Some joins were drawn with the expectation that they would not work. Their role was to expose specific problems — stress points, weak alignments, or issues with magnet placement. These “failed” designs were not wasted effort. They provided information that directly informed subsequent iterations. Drawing became a method of asking better questions rather than finding immediate solutions.

What Drawing Needed to Contain

By the end of this stage, it was clear that a viable join drawing must already account for:

• material thickness and weight

• tolerance and misalignment

• how magnets would be embedded and held

• how parts would be assembled and disassembled by hand

• how the join would read visually once in use

Any drawing that did not address these factors was no longer useful, regardless of how convincing it appeared on screen.

What This Stage Establishes

This phase marked a shift from research and experimentation into structured development. The drawings produced here were not ends in themselves; they were tools for thinking that set the conditions for the next stages of making.

By embedding material behaviour, tolerance and failure into the drawing process, the project moved closer to joinery systems that could operate reliably at scale. The work was no longer speculative in intent, but it was still open-ended in outcome.

With a set of digital designs ready to be tested physically, the next step was to move decisively into production — laser cutting multi-part components and assembling them into working prototypes.

That process would quickly test how much the drawings could withstand contact with reality.