Drawing, graphic sciences and new visualities: an epistemic model

Abstract

This contribution reflects on the future of the graphic sciences by understanding Drawing as an epistemic artefact: a graphic-visual form capable of making relations, measurements, structures, processes and intentions knowable, discussable and verifiable. It seeks to define the disciplinary field of Drawing at the intersection between Graphic Science and Visual Science, without reducing it either to the technical production of graphic artefacts or to the broader study of visuality. Starting from the contemporary transformation of visuality, digital models and generative artificial intelligence, the text distinguishes visual construction from knowledge structure.  Drawing is interpreted as a natural, cultural and translinguistic language, but also as a heteronomous disciplinary field, whose unity does not depend on a single technique, object or method. Its specificity lies in its capacity to integrate cognitive-perceptual, geometric-configurative, operational-communicative and historical-cultural domains. The proposed model is not a rigid taxonomy, but a critical grid for evaluating images, drawings, models, visualisations and immersive environments according to the knowledge they activate, support or make explicit.  In this perspective, the future of the graphic sciences will not consist simply in adopting new tools or multiplying visual outputs, but in distinguishing plausibility from representational validity, automation from control, simulation from documentation, and visibility from knowledge.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.36.2026.6