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October 17, 2006
the drawing board
i (like most people, i think) have always visualized this metaphor relating to art; the "drawing board" was a chalkboard, whiteboard, schoolhouse slate, flip-pad of trace-through-ably thin architectural paper, & going "back to" it meant erasing the old drawing, flipping to a new page, washing the board down, & starting over from scratch.
i met a girl named katie this summer who was making metal jewelry by braiding strands of thin, somewhat-malleable silver wire, & pulling the finished braids through holes in a board sized appropriately for how crushed into shape she wanted the loose braids to become. according to katie, most of us visualize the metaphor entirely incorrectly; the board full of different-sized holes is the "drawing board," "drawing" the braids through the board explains the verb in question, & going "back to the drawing board" means noticing an inconsistency in the finalized weave of a piece of braid & re-bending, then re-drawing it through to compress it more fittingly. there's no eraser in this version; the work done on the art remains, & the return to the drawing board is a way of correcting minor flaws, not scrapping entire concepts to begin anew.
wikipedia has no idea what i'm talking about, and i can't find any online support for this board as an object (she had one in her hands, but it was the type of craft-item that, in its context, was more likely to have been made by/for her than purchased anyway), but i still like katie's version better. and after sufficient googling, i did find this sentence, from an assessment of the relative value of new car designs, which stood alone in a sea of "back to the..." metaphorical uses, & which leads me to believe she's not wholly alone in this conception: "Instead, Chevy produced a work-in-progress in need of another pass through the drawing board."
Posted by ttobryan at October 17, 2006 07:35 PM