ARTISTS and designers could be creating their work on-screen as easily as they do on paper. This is thanks to a programme being perfected at the newly dubbed University of the Arts, formerly the London Institute. All that is needed now is a business partner to get the process off the virtual drawing board.

David Hockney, as co-organiser of this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, has used the event to emphasise the importance of drawing in the creation of the best art, and that it is not just the fine artists who benefit from the discipline. When Hockney’s alma mater, the Royal College of Art, reintroduced drawing as a specific course with its own professor more than a decade ago, it was not the painters and sculptors who turned up in their droves to the little studio at the top of the Kensington Gore building, but designers — particularly fashion designers.

Two years ago the London Institute (comprising Camberwell College of Art, Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design, the London College of Fashion, Chelsea College of Art and Design and the London College of Communication), was runner-up for a Bafta award for a computer programme called Seeing-Drawing.

The programmers examined how drawing is used by artists and designers, and the program was devised with the idea of “not teaching drawing so much as seeing”, according to Fariba Farshad, the leader of the team that created it. Now a development of Seeing-Drawing — which works with the ease of freehand drawing and allows artists and designers to model in three dimensions — looks likely to make an even more dramatic impact.

“What we’re doing is going beyond the programme designers,” says Farshad, formerly a fashion design tutor and now head of research and development at the University of the Arts. “We’re giving artists and designers a multilayered means of expression, putting control of the programme completely in their creative hands for the first time.”

Farshad had her own successful publishing business in Iran and was about to publish the first Iranian children’s encyclopaedia when the fundamentalist regime forced her to leave the country. She went to Paris, to the Sorbonne, and then to London to study gender education, and specifically teaching computer studies to women. She went to the London College of Fashion to teach new technology to designers, and produced the first internet fashion magazine.

Then, in 1998, she was invited to start up the institute’s research and development unit, with funding from the government’s Teaching and Learning Technology Programme, and with one assistant, and the first project was Seeing-Drawing. It was created in collaboration with Falmouth School of Art, the London College of Fashion, the Camberwell College of Art and Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication.

The program has now become a computer paradigm for teaching drawing, and Farshad has just returned from Bangkok University, where the program is to be used.

With the support of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Seeing-Drawing is credited with having helped to persuade ministers to reinstate drawing within the national curriculum. “The flexibility of Seeing-Drawing gave us the idea of trying to create something that would be as easy to use as a pencil,” says Farshad. “It’s easier in some cases, because we wanted to find a way of making it interactive with any part of the body.

“The technology exists, it’s used for medicine, for working out ergonomics, and by the Ford motor company for building safety models, but we need something that goes beyond the constraints of a written program.”

In 2001 her growing department created an interactive wall for artists to work on, on which they could change an image by touching different areas of a huge screen.

With a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this has now been adapted to an interactive mat the size of an ordinary keyboard but with sensors instead of keys, which allows shapes to be changed with different hand movements, as well as colours and sounds.

Work on the I-Mat began two years ago with a team that has now grown to 16, and for the past three months they have been working with 150 students in a virtual studio to make it robust enough for the toughest use. “What we’re creating is a multilayered, three-dimensional means of expression,” Farshad asserts.

Already the Paris-based installation artist and architect Miguel Chevalier, who uses computers extensively, has been involved in the research and plans to use it. But the possibilities, Farshad says, are limitless for artists and designers working alone or in groups, and even on I-Mats remote from each other.

The next development is to create software, and for this she is looking for collaborative business partners. “We don’t know if it would be someone that produces hardware like Sony or a software manufacturer like Microsoft,” she says. “But because of the huge potential we expect to be able to move forward very quickly.”