What is it?
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is treated by designers as a model of how to see. He filled notebooks with drawings of anatomy, water, birds, plants and machines, and treated art, engineering and science as one practice. His attitude is often summed up as saper vedere, 'knowing how to see': looking carefully, then learning from what you see.
Why Design Treats It This Way
His method is the design process in miniature: observe closely, sketch to understand, ask questions, then model or build. He drew things to find out how they work, not only to record them. His machine drawings show structure through cutaway and exploded-style views, which designers still use today. He also learned from nature, studying bird flight to reason about flying machines, and studied human proportion, which connects to anthropometry (see 03) and observation (see 05).
Why You Need to Study It
Leonardo shows that visual thinking is a skill you build: you sketch in order to think, not only to present. Drawing from several viewpoints, understanding proportion and staying curious across subjects are exactly what studio tasks and design interviews look for.
Real-World Example
In his Codex on the Flight of Birds (c. 1505) he studied how bird wings work against the air to reason about human flight. The Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) studies the proportions of the human body. Thousands of pages of his notebooks survive, mixing sketches, notes and mechanisms on the same page.
Exam Tip: How to apply this in entrance papers
Draw the same object from more than one angle and annotate how it works, the way he did. It shows the examiner that you understand the object, not just its outline.
