Taking Your Brain for a Stroll23 Aug
A,
Returning to our conversation on designing work, I want to say that I know how easy it is to avoid practicing being a designer. When learning any new skill that is difficult and doesn’t come naturally, we can find all sorts of good excuses not to work on it. Oh well, you might say, I can’t design today because my brain feels fat. Or, I have no ideas today because I lost my mind watching pro wrestling on television last night. You know good excuses that come easily. We can be quite creative with these excuses at times. [If we could only channel this creativity for good rather than evil.]
Instead, what you need to do is take some time every week and exercise your design brain. Take it out for a stroll. Give it some air. Let it see the world and absorb some new information. Here is something which I encourage you to do. It is an exercise just like a 5 minute dovetail or sharpening your small chisel before taking on a 2″ wide plane iron. Draw. Draw with a pencil. Draw with a pen. It doesn’t matter. [Do not be too hard on your drawing skills either. It does not matter if your drawings are not good. Good drawing skills will come with practice. Shut off that critical voice and just draw.]
No, the important thing is to be practicing your drawing because in effect what you will be practicing is your looking, your seeing. This practice is critical for you because it will help your design skills. At the same time, the more you practice drawing the better you will get at it. So when the time comes to draw a great chair you see at a restaurant or a cornice on a building, you can get out your pen and make a sketch of it.
So, the practice is this, if you are sitting at a cafe and like the look of that chair for instance, get out your notebook. You have a design notebook of course that you carry with you. Number and date it and keep all the notebooks you fill. Draw the cafe chair. Or draw the face of the woman at the next table. Draw the view out the window. But start to look at things and draw them.
Draw for form: pick and draw out shapes that intrigue you. Draw for balance: frame the scene in your mind and draw the interesting shapes within. Draw for rhythm or pattern: look for the patterns you see in buildings or nature and use them as decoration or the central theme of a motif.
Drawing like this becomes more for me then a form of meditation as well as an exercise in seeing. And as with all meditations there is no absolute goal except being there in the moment and seeing/ feeling/ breathing. I know that the idea I am sketching may need to be drawn out better or models made up to flesh it out. But by sitting quietly and looking carefully at things, we discover ideas and forms and shapes that speak to us. We also access the side of our brain that needs fluency in order to be able to design well. Take it out for a walk more often and it will reward your efforts.
