Just begin

John Cage (1912-1992), the US composer and philosopher, knew well the challenges of just getting started. For him, music was a complete universe that could be entered at any point to find something to work with: 'Begin anywhere', he advised. And so with design and the ideation workshop. But that is not to say that ideation begins with a clean slate or that the mind starts blank (tabula rasa). In reality, nobody begins from scratch. Even in computer science, AI included, an initial data-set or knowledge-base is placed there by the human designer. And so, every designer consciously or not, draws on a reservoir of past ideas and forms, and, as a practice unfolds, past experience: incomplete projects, intuitions and half-formed thoughts that have been put aside to revisit later. But also, a project is never fully contained in its beginning. That is, the first sketch is just that: a beginning, an intuition to be developed, and whatever is drawn there will change and evolve as it is fleshed out. If there is no capacity for change, it’s a flawed beginning. The role of drawing, then, as a fluid medium of thought is a place where designers can set down and test ideas, a medium always incomplete. More, https://drawingmatter.org/just-begin/