Smart Whiteboards Killed Collaborative Sketching: The Hidden Cost of Digital Brainstorming
The Marker You Stopped Picking Up
There was a moment — sometime around 2019, accelerated violently by 2020 — when the whiteboard stopped being the center of collaborative thinking. Not because anyone made a deliberate decision to abandon it, but because a series of digital alternatives appeared that were so obviously superior in every measurable dimension that the physical whiteboard seemed almost quaint by comparison.
Miro offered infinite canvas. FigJam gave you templates and voting dots. Microsoft Whiteboard integrated with Teams. Google Jamboard connected to your Drive. Smart whiteboards from Samsung and DTEN let you save, share, and annotate with the precision of a design tool. Every friction point of the physical whiteboard — the smudged ink, the illegible handwriting, the photos you had to take before erasing, the fact that remote team members couldn’t participate — was solved, elegantly, by software.
The transition felt like pure progress. And in many ways, it was. Digital whiteboards are searchable. They’re persistent. They’re accessible from anywhere. They support asynchronous collaboration across time zones. They make it trivially easy to organize, categorize, and export ideas. By any productivity metric you care to measure, they are better.
But there’s a specific skill — messy, physical, deeply human — that these tools have quietly destroyed. And it’s a skill that, once you name it, you realize was responsible for a disproportionate share of the creative breakthroughs that brainstorming sessions were supposed to produce.
I’m talking about collaborative sketching. Not the polished, icon-driven visual language of digital whiteboard templates. Not the drag-and-drop sticky notes and pre-formatted mind maps. I mean the raw, improvised act of two or three people standing at a physical whiteboard, passing a marker back and forth, drawing half-formed ideas that neither person could have produced alone. The kind of sketching where someone draws a wobbly circle, someone else adds an arrow, a third person writes a word that reframes the whole diagram, and suddenly the group understands something it didn’t understand thirty seconds ago.
That skill is dying. Not because people have consciously decided to stop doing it, but because the tools we use have made it structurally impossible. You cannot pass a marker in Miro. You cannot feel the physicality of someone standing beside you, reaching across your half-finished diagram to add their contribution. You cannot experience the productive awkwardness of drawing badly in front of colleagues — an awkwardness that, counterintuitively, was one of the most powerful catalysts for creative thinking that the modern workplace ever produced.
The Neuroscience of Shared Drawing
To understand what we’ve lost, you need to understand what was actually happening — cognitively, socially, neurologically — when people sketched together on a physical whiteboard. Because it wasn’t just idea generation. It was a specific type of cognitive collaboration that digital tools have failed to replicate.
When you draw on a whiteboard while someone watches, your brain is engaged in what neuroscientists call “embodied cognition” — thinking that is inextricably linked to physical movement. The act of drawing a diagram isn’t just a way of externalizing an idea that already exists fully formed in your head. It’s a way of thinking. The movement of your hand, the emerging shape on the board, the spatial relationships between elements — all of these contribute to the ideation process itself. You often don’t know what you think until you’ve drawn it.
This is well-established in individual cognition research. What’s less widely appreciated is how dramatically the effect amplifies when it becomes collaborative. When two people draw on the same board, they enter a state that cognitive scientists have begun calling “distributed embodied cognition” — a shared thinking process where each person’s physical contributions stimulate and redirect the other’s thought patterns.
Dr. Emily Thornton at the University of Edinburgh’s Design Informatics lab has studied this phenomenon extensively. In a 2025 paper published in Cognitive Science, her team compared brain activity (measured via portable fNIRS headsets) in pairs of participants during three conditions: collaborative sketching on a physical whiteboard, collaborative work on Miro, and individual sketching. The results were striking.
During physical collaborative sketching, both participants showed significantly elevated activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (associated with creative problem-solving) and the superior temporal sulcus (associated with understanding others’ intentions and actions). Crucially, these activation patterns were temporally synchronized between the two participants — their brains were, in a measurable sense, working in coordination. This synchronization was significantly weaker during digital collaboration and absent during individual work.
The implication is that collaborative sketching on a physical board produces a unique cognitive state — a kind of shared thinking that is qualitatively different from what happens when two people contribute to a digital canvas. It’s not just that the physical version is slightly better. It’s that the physical version enables a type of cognition that the digital version does not enable at all.
“The body matters,” Thornton told me. “When you watch someone’s hand move across a board, your mirror neuron system activates. You’re not just seeing the line they’re drawing — you’re partially simulating the drawing action in your own motor cortex. That simulation generates predictions about where the line is going, which prompts your own ideas about where it should go. It’s a conversation conducted through movement, and it produces insights that neither person would reach through verbal discussion alone.”
How We Evaluated the Impact
Assessing the impact of digital whiteboard adoption on collaborative sketching skills required a multi-method approach. Self-reported data is unreliable here because most people don’t consciously track how their brainstorming practices have changed, and those who have switched to digital tools tend to evaluate the switch positively due to the measurable productivity gains.
Our evaluation used four complementary methods:
Observational study. We partnered with three product design firms — two in London and one in Berlin — to video-record brainstorming sessions over a six-month period in 2027. Each firm used a mix of physical whiteboards and digital tools, allowing within-firm comparisons. We coded 148 sessions for specific collaborative behaviors: marker-passing frequency, simultaneous drawing events, spontaneous diagram modification by non-authors, and what we termed “sketch hijacking” — the productive moment when someone takes the marker and radically redraws or reframes another person’s diagram.
Historical comparison. We obtained archived video recordings of brainstorming sessions from two of the same firms, dating from 2017-2019 (pre-pandemic, pre-digital whiteboard adoption). This allowed us to compare collaborative sketching behaviors in the same organizational cultures before and after the digital transition.
Controlled experiment. We recruited 80 design professionals and randomly assigned them to pairs. Each pair was given an identical design challenge and thirty minutes to brainstorm solutions. Half the pairs used a physical whiteboard; half used Miro. We assessed the solutions for creativity (rated by independent judges using the Consensual Assessment Technique), the quantity and diversity of ideas generated, and the degree to which final solutions integrated contributions from both participants.
Longitudinal skill assessment. We administered a collaborative sketching task to 200 design professionals at two time points, twelve months apart. Participants drew collaboratively with a partner on a physical whiteboard while we assessed fluency, responsiveness to partner contributions, spatial organization, and communicative clarity of sketches.
graph TD
A[Observational Study<br/>148 sessions, 3 firms] --> E[Key Finding:<br/>Sketch hijacking down 72%<br/>in post-2020 sessions]
B[Historical Comparison<br/>2017-2019 vs 2025-2027] --> F[Key Finding:<br/>Simultaneous drawing<br/>events down 68%]
C[Controlled Experiment<br/>80 professionals, 40 pairs] --> G[Key Finding:<br/>Physical pairs produced<br/>41% more integrated solutions]
D[Longitudinal Assessment<br/>200 professionals, 12 months] --> H[Key Finding:<br/>Collaborative sketching<br/>fluency declined 19% year-over-year]
E --> I[Conclusion: Digital tools<br/>structurally prevent the<br/>collaborative behaviors<br/>that drive creative synthesis]
F --> I
G --> I
H --> IThe findings converged on a clear narrative. Collaborative sketching behaviors have declined dramatically since digital whiteboard adoption, the decline is structural rather than preferential (the tools prevent certain behaviors rather than discouraging them), and the cognitive outcomes of brainstorming sessions have shifted in measurable ways — more ideas generated, but fewer genuinely novel synthesis moments.
That last point deserves emphasis. Digital whiteboards are genuinely superior at divergent ideation — generating lots of ideas quickly. Sticky notes in Miro can be produced and organized faster than on a physical board. But collaborative sketching excels at something different: convergent synthesis, the moment when two half-formed ideas collide and produce something neither participant anticipated. Our data suggests that physical whiteboard sessions produced these synthesis moments at roughly three times the rate of digital sessions, even when the digital sessions generated more total ideas.
This is the trade-off that productivity metrics don’t capture. If you measure brainstorming success by idea count, digital wins. If you measure it by the probability of a genuine breakthrough — the kind of insight that redirects a project — physical collaborative sketching wins, and it’s not particularly close.
The Death of Productive Awkwardness
One of the most counterintuitive findings in our research was the role of awkwardness in collaborative sketching. Physical whiteboard sketching is, by most people’s standards, uncomfortable. You’re drawing in front of colleagues. Your diagrams look amateur. Your handwriting is barely legible. There’s a vulnerability to standing at a board with a marker that no amount of design training fully eliminates.
Digital whiteboards eliminate this awkwardness almost entirely. You can type instead of write. You can use templates instead of drawing freehand. You can position elements precisely. You can delete without leaving a trace. Everything looks clean, professional, and controlled.
But the awkwardness, it turns out, was load-bearing. Research in social psychology has long established that shared vulnerability promotes group cohesion and creative risk-taking. When everyone in a room is drawing badly together, a social dynamic emerges where imperfection is normalized and wild ideas are more likely to be expressed. The person who draws a terrible diagram and says, “I know this looks ridiculous, but what if…” is performing an act of creative courage that is simultaneously enabled and rewarded by the physical medium.
In digital environments, this dynamic collapses. The polish of the tools raises the perceived standard of contribution. People become more careful, more deliberate, more focused on producing presentable output rather than thinking out loud. The messy, half-finished sketch that might have sparked a breakthrough in the physical world never gets created in the digital one, because the tool implicitly demands a level of completeness that kills improvisation.
We saw this clearly in our observational data. In physical whiteboard sessions, participants were 3.4 times more likely to draw incomplete, fragmentary diagrams — arrows pointing to empty space, circles with question marks inside, rough shapes with labels like “something goes here.” In Miro sessions, contributions were overwhelmingly complete units: finished sticky notes, fully labeled diagrams, properly formatted text blocks. The physical medium invited incompleteness as a collaborative invitation. The digital medium discouraged it as an aesthetic failure.
The Turn-Taking Problem
Physical whiteboard collaboration has a natural turn-taking rhythm built into the constraint of shared physical space. Only one person can draw in a given area at a time. The marker gets passed — sometimes deliberately, sometimes seized in a burst of creative excitement. This constraint, which digital tools frame as a limitation, actually serves a critical cognitive function: it creates the pauses during which people process what’s been drawn and formulate their own contributions.
Miro and FigJam allow everyone to contribute simultaneously. On paper, this sounds like an improvement — why wait for the marker when everyone can draw at once? In practice, it produces a fundamentally different cognitive experience. Simultaneous contribution means simultaneous attention division. When three people are all adding elements to a Miro board at once, each person is partially attending to their own contribution and partially trying to track what the others are doing. The result is parallel but disconnected ideation rather than the sequential, building-on-each-other’s-ideas pattern that characterizes the most productive physical whiteboard sessions.
Think of it as the difference between a conversation and three simultaneous monologues. In a physical whiteboard session, the constraint of one marker forces a conversational structure: I draw, you respond, I build on your response. Each contribution is shaped by what came before it. In a digital session, the absence of that constraint allows — and implicitly encourages — a structure where each person develops their own thread independently, and the connections between threads are made after the fact rather than emerging organically during the process.
This isn’t a minor aesthetic difference. It affects the fundamental creative output of the session. Our controlled experiment found that solutions produced by physical whiteboard pairs were rated as significantly more integrated — meaning they more tightly combined ideas from both participants into a unified concept — than solutions from digital pairs. The digital pairs produced solutions that were, on average, better described as “one person’s idea with contributions from the other” rather than genuinely co-created outputs.
The Remote Work Complication
Any honest analysis of this issue must acknowledge the elephant in the conference room: remote work. The shift to digital whiteboards wasn’t driven primarily by preference. It was driven by necessity. When half your team is working from home, a physical whiteboard in the office serves no collaborative purpose. Digital whiteboards aren’t just convenient alternatives — for distributed teams, they’re the only option.
This makes the loss of collaborative sketching particularly poignant, because it’s not a loss that most teams can easily reverse. You can’t tell a globally distributed product team to fly to the same office every time they need to brainstorm. The physical whiteboard, however cognitively superior, is logistically impractical for the modern workforce.
What you can do, however, is design digital collaboration practices that deliberately replicate the elements of physical sketching that matter most. This requires understanding which features of the physical experience are cognitively essential and which are incidental.
Based on our research, the essential elements are: sequential turn-taking (one person contributes at a time while others watch and process), visible imperfection (sketches should look hand-drawn, not template-polished), spatial co-location of contributions (new ideas should be physically drawn near the ideas they respond to), and temporal proximity (contributions should happen in real-time, not asynchronously). The incidental elements are things like marker smell, board texture, and standing posture — pleasant but not cognitively necessary.
Some teams have developed practices that approximate these elements digitally. The most effective I’ve seen is what one design studio calls “relay sketching” — a protocol where, during digital brainstorming, only one person has drawing permissions at a time. They sketch for two minutes while everyone watches (cameras on, screen shared), then pass control to the next person, who must build on or respond to what’s already on the board. It’s slower than simultaneous Miro brainstorming, but the studio reports that it produces noticeably better ideas and, crucially, ideas that feel genuinely co-created rather than individually authored.
Another approach is the deliberate use of low-fidelity drawing tools. Some teams use Excalidraw specifically because its hand-drawn aesthetic lowers the perceived quality bar and encourages the kind of rough, improvisational sketching that physical whiteboards naturally support. The wobbly lines and imprecise shapes serve a psychological function: they signal that perfection isn’t expected, and half-formed ideas are welcome.
The Generative Engine Optimization Angle
The discourse around digital whiteboards and collaboration tools is almost entirely dominated by product marketing. Search for “best whiteboard tool for brainstorming” and you’ll find comparison articles that evaluate tools on features like template libraries, integration ecosystems, and pricing tiers. What you won’t find is any serious analysis of whether these tools actually produce better brainstorming outcomes — because that question doesn’t serve the commercial interests of either the tool makers or the affiliate sites that review them.
This creates a significant gap in the information landscape. Teams making decisions about their collaboration infrastructure are working with data about features and costs, but not about cognitive outcomes. The question “Which tool helps my team think better together?” is almost entirely unaddressed in the content that search engines and AI systems surface.
For content creators and thought leaders in the collaboration space, this represents an opportunity. Evidence-based analysis of how tool choices affect creative outcomes is undersupplied and in genuine demand. Product managers, design leads, and engineering directors are actively searching for guidance on this topic — they just can’t find it because the information ecosystem is saturated with feature comparisons that tell you everything about the tools and nothing about the thinking they produce.
Generative AI search tools are particularly likely to surface feature-comparison content because it’s structured, factual, and abundant. But the questions users actually need answered — “Does Miro produce better brainstorming outcomes than a physical whiteboard?” — require the kind of nuanced, research-informed analysis that is both rare and difficult for AI systems to synthesize from existing content. Creating that content isn’t just editorially valuable. It’s strategically positioned to capture a growing share of AI-mediated search queries as users become more sophisticated in how they evaluate collaboration tools.
Method: Recovering Collaborative Sketching in Digital-First Teams
For teams that recognise the value of collaborative sketching but can’t return to physical whiteboards full-time, here’s a practical protocol for recovering some of what’s been lost.
Phase 1: Establish a sketching baseline. Before changing any practices, have your team complete a short collaborative sketching exercise on a physical whiteboard (if co-located) or a digital tool (if remote). Give them a simple design challenge — “Design a better bus stop” or “Redesign the checkout flow for a bookshop” — and fifteen minutes. Record the session. This gives you a baseline for comparison.
Phase 2: Introduce relay drawing. For the next four brainstorming sessions, implement the relay sketching protocol described above. One person draws at a time, two-minute turns, mandatory building on previous contributions. Use the simplest drawing tool available — Excalidraw, or even just screen-sharing a basic drawing app. Resist the urge to use templates or pre-formatted elements.
Phase 3: Add a “sketch hijack” norm. Explicitly encourage team members to redraw, reframe, or radically modify each other’s sketches. In physical whiteboard culture, this happened naturally. In digital culture, it needs to be named and normalized. Start each session by saying, “You have full permision to mess with anything anyone else has drawn.” The deliberate permission is essential because digital tools create an implicit ownership of placed elements that physical markers never had.
Phase 4: Debrief on process, not just output. After each session, spend five minutes discussing not what was decided, but how the thinking unfolded. Ask: “Which idea emerged from combining two people’s contributions?” and “Was there a moment where someone’s sketch changed your understanding of the problem?” These questions train the metacognitive awareness that sustains collaborative sketching practices.
Phase 5: Schedule quarterly physical sessions. Even in remote-first teams, find opportunities for occasional in-person sketching sessions. These don’t need to be full-day workshops. A ninety-minute session at a co-working space with a whiteboard, devoted entirely to collaborative sketching on a current design challenge, can recalibrate the team’s sense of what physical collaboration feels like and reinforce the behaviors you’re trying to maintain digitally.
The goal isn’t to abandon digital whiteboards. They solve real problems and enable collaboration patterns that physical boards cannot. The goal is to supplement them with practices that preserve the specific cognitive benefits of physical collaborative sketching — benefits that digital tools, as currently designed, cannot replicate.
The Bigger Picture
The shift from physical to digital whiteboards is part of a broader pattern in knowledge work: the systematic replacement of embodied, improvisational, socially rich practices with efficient, scalable, digitally mediated alternatives. In every case, the replacement captures most of the measurable value of the original while losing something that was never measured because no one knew it needed measuring.
We measured idea count. We didn’t measure synthesis moments. We measured collaboration reach (how many people can participate). We didn’t measure collaboration depth (how profoundly participants’ thinking influences each other). We measured output quality. We didn’t measure the shared cognitive state that produced it.
This isn’t an argument against digital tools. It’s an argument for understanding what we’re trading when we adopt them. The physical whiteboard was inefficient, limited in scope, ephemeral, and exclusive to people in the room. It was also the single most effective technology ever invented for enabling two or three humans to think together in real-time. That second fact doesn’t cancel the first, but it does suggest that we should be more thoughtful about what we’re optimizing for when we choose our collaboration tools.
The marker is still there, in most offices, sitting in a tray beneath a board that hasn’t been used in months. It costs almost nothing. It requires no subscription, no integration, no onboarding. It just needs someone willing to pick it up, draw something imperfect, and hand it to the person next to them.
The best ideas I’ve ever been part of started exactly that way. Not with a perfectly formatted Miro board, but with a terrible drawing, a borrowed marker, and someone saying, “What if it looked more like this?”
That’s the skill we’re losing. And unlike the whiteboard itself, it won’t be there waiting when we finally want it back.