Being on the cusp of a longue durée technological shift from analogue to digital drawing offers an opportunity for the proliferation of possible transmedial conditions. The first-year undergraduate drawing course at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University, challenges a current understanding of drawing as image production through the use of a single dominant medium, portraying mirror-likes of future buildings that fix the ending of the design process.  Conversely, transmediality places attention in changes of media that create gaps to foster the construction of ideas. Ideas emerge through hand and digital transmedial exercises. Students experience the imaginative nature of architectural drawing as an open process. Transmedial time constructs are a means to the discovery of ideas, and not an execution of preconcepts.

Concepts develop in the exploration of mediums through both high and low technologies, digital and hand work, experiencing the disruptive resistance that arises in the changes of mediums and techniques. Drawing is not mere transmission of information; it can inform open explorations that are precise and imprecise, regulated and unruly, making room for an active imagination. In a transmedial process ideas are formed and deformed in the passage from one medium to another. Changes of medium accelerate imaginative discoveries. The traction of transmediality is experienced when models become contact photographs; contact photographs become drawings; drawings become buildings. Each change of medium draws out the imagination by blurring the distinction between drawing and model, analogue and digital. 

Beginning design students explore the transmediality of physical models becoming drawings, which turn into photographs, and scans that are shredded and collaged. A transmedial process enacts timely material transformations and deformations that generate opportunities for serendipitous discoveries. The exercises rely on a tension between shifting notions from analogue to digital tools and vice versa, to challenge the use of a singular medium, and conceive of architectural representation as a transmedial time construct.