Visual design tools are, for example, gesture, sketch, drawing, scale model, perspective drawing, photograph, film, video. Eugene S. Ferguson’s 1977 paper in Science, entitled The mind’s eye: Nonverbal thought in technology, is credited for clarifying the role of visual reasoning in the thinking process. In this article he reasoned that Thinking with pictures is an essential strand in the intellectual history of technological development. He concludes his article with the following statement:
Much of the creative thought of the designers of our technological world is nonverbal, not easily reducible to words; its language is an object or a picture or a visual image in the mind. It is out of this kind of thinking that the clock, printing press, and snowmobile have arisen. Technologists, converting their nonverbal knowledge into objects directly (as when an artisan fashioned an American ax) or into drawings that have enabled others to build what was in their minds, have chosen the shape and many of the qualities of our man-made surroundings. This intellectual component of technology, which is non-literary and non-scientific, has been generally unnoticed because its origins lie in art and not in science.
As the scientific component of knowledge in technology has increased markedly in the 19th and 20th centuries, the tendency has been to lose sight of the crucial part played by nonverbal knowledge in making the big decisions of form, arrangement, and texture, that determine the parameters within which a system will operate.
In his work claims Ferguson that visual reasoning is a widely used tool used in creating technological artefacts. There is ample evidence that visual methods, particularly drawing, play a central role in creating artefacts.