How do you draw a circle?

I just stumbled across a great article that analysed how different cultures draw a circle.

They found strong arguments that the way you draw circles relates to your cultural context, or to be more precise, to the language and writing system you use.

For example, if in your writing system, circles shaped letters or symbols are drawn counterclockwise there is a good chance that you will draw circles generally counterclockwise. But this is not true for children that have not had long exposure to the dominant writing system.

I also found the quick draw application by Google, upon which their data analysis was based, worth a visit. It is meant to help to teach a machine how humans draw (and it tells you what it sees in real time!) I actually could not stop laughing. Give it a try.

There have been just a few analyses of these data sets. Another study looked at drawing times. You’ll be surprised how quickly a machine can tell what you draw! I could think of various ideas for analysing this if it was in a format I could parse.

Posted

3 October 2017

Design comment

Nicole Lotz

Tags:

design tools

Comments

2 responses to “How do you draw a circle?”

Georgina Holden

9 October 2017

This was a really interesting article, I gave it a try and defied expected cultural norms by drawing my circle in a clockwise direction. The discussion of these choices in terms of written language is fascinating. However, I wonder whether other cultural influences are at play too? For example, the dominant mode of circle drawing in Japan is clockwise. Japan also has a Buddhist tradition and there is a significance in Buddhism of moving in a clockwise rather than counter clockwise direction. I also wonder what the implications are for design, we are used to ‘stereotypes’ for taps and knobs, do different cultures have different expectations of the ways in which these will turn?

Reply
Nicole Lotz

9 October 2017

I agree that there must also be other factors at play, and I think this is supported by the fact that some cultures went against the expected result for preferences of circle drawing mode. But I do think that you are right and these preferences will influence expectations and usability of devices and applications etc. Another research study in Turkey once found that domestic products are those most influenced by cultural preferences, such as white goods, i.e. watching machines.

Reply

How do you draw a circle?

Comments

2 responses to “How do you draw a circle?”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply