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Drawn to Speculate: Exploring Speculative Thinking and Drawing through 4E Cognitive Theories

Essi Varis, University of Helsinki

It is the type of creative work that usually goes unmentioned in the Halls of Academia – yet, sometimes, somehow, somewhere, it needs to be done. Never knowing exactly where it might end, one reaches into the most amorphous vestiges of mind – to the half-formed hunches, unsettled inklings, predictions, dreams, and imaginings – and starts drawing them into the presence of consciousness little by little, line by line, conception for conception. It is the only way, after all, to make these cognitions available for reflection and evaluation, so that they could be developed into the direction one intends, and that, as a result, new ideas and insights could be born.

Indeed, the acts of drawing and speculating have much in common, both functionally and experientially. Yet, while speculation is routinely practiced by researchers – for instance, in the form of hypothesizing and theorizing – it is rarely scaffolded by drawing practices, at least in the Humanities. The question is: what might be gained if these two, drawing and speculating, were paired more often by researchers?

In my presentation, I use the framework of so-called “4E” cognitive theories to discuss how speculative thinking can be Embedded, Embodied, Enacted, and even Extended in drawing practices. In particular, I wish to highlight the experiential and functional similarities between speculative cognition and the act of drawing without a material reference. Both are open-ended processes that recruit a wide range of epistemic and cognitive resources in order to produce something genuinely new and porous – something that invites engagement beyond the kind of semantic understanding sciences underscore.

These cognitive similarities suggest, furthermore, that drawing and speculation might boost each other in unique ways, and that both are valuable for the same reason: they allow us to think outside the so-called “givens” and “certainties” embodied by immediate, empirical perception and verbal, declarative knowledge. I suggest that these innovative, creative potentials of drawing and speculating ultimately depend on the way they make use of affordances – or dynamic, situational possibilities for action – across various different domains. In this sense, they also parallel the defamiliarizing logic of poetic metaphors.

While my approach is mostly based on 4E theories of cognition, I will further qualify my discussion with examples drawn from my own, drawing-centered research practices. These include mind-mapping, the varying processes of designing graphs and presentation slides, as well as reading and making research comics, such as Nick Sousanis’ The Unflattening (2015) and my own short, metaphoric comic “The Skeleton is Already Inside You” (2022).

Keywords: speculation, imagination, creativity, cognition, ideational drawing