Begin Anywhere
July 15, 2013Those words are John Cage’s advice for artists paralyzed by not knowing where (or how) to start. I’m starting here, BEFORE retooling my website around my current goals (getting back into a architecture & sustainability at a large firm). I never got started blogging and instead wrote some longer essays that became too cumbersome to post or publish. I plan to break some of those ideas down into smallish (300 word) posts.
Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (1998), which incorporates Cage’s point, is one way I know I am a designer. http://www.brucemaudesign.com/4817/112450/work/incomplete-manifesto-for-growth
It’s a great description of what it is like to solve problems creatively and full of some of the little tricks artists use to get to the state of mind where they know they can be most effective.
Competitive athletes know when they are “in the zone,” where their movements and focus results in a kind of unconsciously high performance. They may not know how to GET in the zone, it’s Zen-like, but they know when they are there. A good design process is like that. In addition to “practice, practice, practice,” finding the way back to The Zone requires one to develop daily habits that make a successful outcome more likely.
Future posts will be about a lot of different subjects–architecture, sustainability, culture, technology, politics etc.– but the posts are also about beginning somewhere/anywhere to be in a position for good things to happen.
