You know how people like to say “oh, he won the genetic lottery”? It’s the idea that all the variations of genes magically produced a winning combination that makes you great at sports, art, music, or whatever.

I think there’s something missing from the picture – our subconscious habits and patterns. Think about this, ever since we were little, we learned things by focusing on the results. You see your parents hold a cup and you mimic it, and as long as you can hold the cup with the same firmness, speed, and agility, then all is okay. This process happens everywhere, from walking to speaking, to running… Go into an elementary school and you’ll see every kid writing in different postures. But hey, as long as the letters look the same, its all good right?

Well, you might say that these activities are not competitive and do not exert enough forces to encourage people to find the most efficient solution. You are right. However, look at professional piano players, they may have similar hand techniques but beyond that, they seem to go out of their way to contort their bodies in response to the music, and they do so in ways different from each other.

The way we learn things is almost like the way we teach machines to learn. Focus on the results and filter out all the variations and patterns that doesn’t work. The problem is that unlike machines, we do not methodologically go through every permutation. We settle on the first one that works well enough.

As years go by, subconscious patterns build upon one another. From your ability to make letters, comes your ability to draw. You learn to sit and the sitting postures influence the way you type on the computer. How you learned to hold a spoon might later on grow into the feeling you get on what is natural when holding a phone, a mouse, or even a surgical knife.

The more these patterns build upon one another, the more complex activities we can do. Until eventually we reach the point where many of our skills have more resemblance to little miracles than their humble beginnings. Humans become capable to achieve amazing feats without the least bit of understanding of all the processes that automatically happen. We just will it, and it works.

Just like magic.

Any science sufficiently advanced will appear like magic to the outsider.

The same can be said for learning. When enough patterns build upon each other, it becomes miraculous…until the day it stops working.

As a society, we tend to ignore the failures, the rejects, the abnormals. Their existence is classified as outliers, or perhaps simply mental problems or disabilities. But I think it also shows how big the blackbox is that resides in each of us. One day, it might come to pass that an accident leaves you unable to access what enabled you to write. How would you ever know how to rebuild the skill that you lost?

The bigger problem, I think, is one of potential. If our blackboxes are full of processes that was originally chosen based on what worked first instead of what works best, then think of all the potential that is going to waste. If you could somehow optimize it, borrow patterns from other people that works better than your own, imagine your potential.

This is why I call it the subconscious crapshoot. It’s pretty random which variation of ‘picking up a pencil’ you got, or which ‘stand on your toes’ did you figure out. One day, when you’ve built your towers of skill, reach the heights of your writing ability or jumping potential, this little pattern might be what’s holding you back from greatness. What if you could change….?

But let’s rewind back a few years and start the story there. It was 2008 and I just came back from China. Every week my dad goes to a singing teacher and learns Opera. Being home with nothing serious to do until the start of the new school year, my father decided it was a good time for me to join him.

My teacher’s name is Dawn; she is kind, and encouraging, and wonderful, and marvelous, and, and, and… Dawn believes that good singing is about having good support and good vocal position.

Support – the control of the breath using the diaphram and the abdominal muscles.

Vocal position – control of muscles in your mouth.

Since then, and over the next 3 years, I heard these two ideas in every single lesson, with every teacher. It is ingrained in the pedagogy of everyone I met in the opera singing world. Ask someone what they think of singing technique and you will get a variation of the above.

Problem was, I did not get it. This way of learning seemed not only foreign to me but it also seemed completely wrong. I heard things like “oh, do that but think more forward,” or, “don’t push up, feel the support compressing.” When it really got wild, you hear things like “imagine the sound coming out of the front of your forehead like a unicorn horn, resonnating in a large cathedral.”

It was a blackbox to me. Or maybe it was more like a map to nowhere – all these instructions and visualizations meant nothing. How can a picture inside my mind help me move the muscles of my body? Unicorn magic, it aint.

I only started improving earnstly when I abandoned these teachings. I began to look for my own paths, do my own experiments, make my own theory by cherry-picking ideas from other fields. But all the while, I had a nagging thought in mind, a large doubt, a shadow over my newfound progress.

How can everyone be wrong? A conspiracy theory involving these kind and lovely ladies is less likely than pigs pretending to not be able to fly. More realistically, these ideas come from people who really are good at singing – a category that I was certainly not a member of. So it is only logical to think that I must have overlooked something, or perhaps I was, at least in part, wrong.

This brings me back to what happened today. While I was singing, I experienced something that really resembles what my teachers was describing and I am a better singer because of it. But does this mean that, today, I proved myself wrong?

It is a strange feeling, having foresaw this possibility since three years ago, seeing it come true and experienacing an “I told you so” from my past self. Was I simply stubborn for three years refusing to see the light? Or perhaps I am a glutton for punishment, and would only do things the hard way? Probably a little bit of both. But dear past self, I am really glad you took this harder path.

I think the lesson I learned is that often teaching is less about learning and more about filtering. Had I actually tried to keep doing it the proper way, I probably would have failed. The techniques and descriptions only seem to work for people who shared the same foundation – who intuitively already knew how to sing but only needed to practice doing it consistently. I did not know how to sing, or you could say that my foundation was flawed. I spent three years trying to get to even ground, and if I did not do it my way, I would have been filtered out – a casualty for the sake of art.

What is it the enables us to easily learn something? Hidden from even our own thoughts, we have habits and abilities collected since birth. These are the blackboxes within each of us, when they work, they enables us to fit in and become great. But when they fail, it leaves us without any knowledge of how to proceed.

I have a new doubt now, and its casting a shadow on the skills I excel at. I am uncertain how much learning I actual have, and how much of it was only practical knowledge built upon invisible foundations. Thankfully, the thought of this makes me happy, because it means there is so much more to learn

All of these are great and helpful. They let you analyze design, they give you things to talk about, even a way to plot new directions. But what is lacking is a framework that has learning at its center.

Here’s what I think the elements of design should be in a framework that was all about learning design and how to get better at design.

1. Mathematical ratios and the system of grids.

In order to chunk down design into more manageable sizes, my first “chunk” would be something that can express and explain many of the variations in 2d design. More importantly, it has to be something that is a good measure of design ability.

The theory of composition and ratios are a good fit. For one, they can be expressed simply into numbers. Two, one can measure your knowledge of grids, not just by theory but through practical tests. Example, [ __ ] what is the ratio of the white space between either side of the underscore?

Ratios and spaces can be remembered. One can learn to know what 3:2 looks like or 16:9 or 1:10. The intuitive understanding of ratios is a good way to measure your learning progress of visual design.

2. Perception of depth

I don’t like to think of perspective as one major element of design. This is because many of the ways to express depth is not at all involved with how things receed into the distance. Shadows, overlapping edges, highlights and colours can often give the illusion of depth even while violating the rules of perspective.

More importantly, depth is not “visual”. To learn depth, one must associate it with the feeling of movement. In and out of space. Even though visual arts don’t need to distinguish between up down left and right, as it is all relative to the viewpoint of perspective, in practice, how people feels in relation to your design is vital. Is it a top down feeling? or a forward back feeling? We intuitvely understand up and down. In and out.

3. Texture

I think this is important, but I don’t know much about it. I’m just putting it here for now

Depending on the tools that you are familiar with, this idea may seem either natural to you or simply outrageous. So I’d like to begin this by writing about a few examples that illustrate my point, and then later on in another post, I will talk about the implications of this way of thinking.

1. tools are an extension of memory

The more complicated a task is, that harder it is to remember or conceive the all the parts. Take chess for example, if you were to reduce chess only to chess notation, you’d get something that looks like this

e4 e5

Nf3 Nc6

Bb5 a6

which is close to incomprehensible. However, think of the chess board, and all of a sudden the same moves become filled with rich sensory feedback, more importantly they become easy to understand and to remember. It is probably not fair to use a chessboard as a representation of how other tools influence memory, but it does illustrate the point.

One of the key to having a better memory of something is to know it via multiple senses. An apple is easy to recall because you know it by feel, by taste, by the crunching sound when you bite into it, and by its look and colour.

This process happens with tools more subtly everyday. A photographer’s understanding of apertures is enhanced by the clicks and feel of manually dialing the aperture ring. Similarily, this would explain why there is such an obsession by typists on mechanical keyboards.

2. tools help us think

Composing music does not require many tools. In an simplified world, the composer simply conceives the music and puts it to paper. Indeed, there are people who believe in this exact method of composing – distill music down to its barest essentials, then work on exercising one’s mental abilities.

This is true for artists as well. Many people think that a great artist simply sees in his mind’s eye everything that needs to be done. The painting part is simply a way of getting a genius’s thoughts on canvas so that others can see.

I used to believe this…

But sometimes problems and ideas are simply too big to think of, too big to manipulate purely inside one’s mind. In practice, composers go to the piano and the simple task of playing it on the keys help tremendously. Artists sketch, make drafts, and using a myriad of tools that helps break big problems in to bite sized tasks. I once heard on the radio an interview with the first violinist of a big orchestra. Before a group of violinists can perform together, somebody, usually the first violinist, has to come up with the bowings. The bowings are the written instructions on how each violinists will use their bow. This done so that all the violinists are in sync or out sync, depending on the needs of the music. In the interview, the violinist said, that most of the time she can do bowing inside her head. But she is only able to do so by imagining a violin inside in her mind. Technically, the idea of synchronizing a group of musicians does not require a tool, but her familiarity with a using a violin helps her tackle this big problem rather easily.

3. tools shape our preferences

So I’ve talked about how tools let us remember details, and how they help us conceive and solve big problems. My last example will take about how this all influence our preferences.

Tools are opinionated; they emphasize certains things while de-emphasizing others. They focus your attention on a small part of the process by making all the other parts easier and more effortless.

Think of a word processor with its abilities to undo and redo and edit and compare this to the act of writing on paper. The word processer de-emphasizes the need to think ahead of time, because the cost to make changes is so small. On the other hand, writing in pen is practically unchangable, and this forces the writer to think and flesh out his sentence before he commits them to paper. You how these two different tools that perform the same end function, can have a dramatic impact on the creation process.

This same influence can be seen in just about every other artistic endeavour. In painting, watercolour paints do not layer easily, and it forces the artist to think about and plan out the process of how to apply the paint. There is only one go, and no turning back.

Oil paints on the other hand is much more forgiving in its ability to layer one paint ontop of a number. However, it takes longer to accomplish the same action and this makes the oil painter focus on long term directions and also how to deal with quick changing enviroments.

The two tools are fairly similar in what they are trying to accomplish, but the abilities they help develop are very different. This diffence manifests even in the artists’s sense of beauty. The watercolourist becomes really capable of finding improvisasional beauty and in the elegance of doing something in one go. Whereas the oil painter, enabled by his slow drying medium, can be much more philosophical and aim to solve long and complicated problems.

This is not to say that there is no value to originality. On the contrary, great things must be original and revelatory. However, to get there, a person should build up more experiences than his rivals. It is the seemingly innocuous details that truly matter.

If learning more about the foundations of our daily movements makes them more meaningful to us, and makes us more capable of distinguishing small but important differences. Then an expert of a certain task is simply someone who also can distinguish more about this task than a normal person. Take for example, the playing of a piano: An expert should find a wealth of meaningful and interesting things in a small detail like the movement of the wrist. A beginner will not perceive or take any real interest, because to him, there is no mental difference between the various ways of moving the wrist.

To extend this further, a good programmer is not someone who knows by memory his programming language/framework the best, but rather someone who can feel and experience the minute details of various implementations.

What does this mean for the learning something like design? Design theory is inherently too broad to focus on smaller details. So what ends up shaping the designer’s thoughts are the expertise he picked up in order to produce his designs. A designer that uses wood as his material becomes familiar to the details and differences that are part of the process of working with wood – the direction of the wood, the moisture…etc. Being able to recognize these details allows him to make better wood works but it also shapes his aesthetics. He might find a piece of wood beautiful because of the rarity of the patterns of the grain. He might also find a piece of work beautiful because he can see the economy and efficiency of the woodworker from the tool marks. However, the important thing here is that the designer finds beauty in the “craft” part of his work, and this is a type of beauty that is not shared by the general public. The general public, having not learned woodworking, sees none of the small details, and find the result worthless.

How to solve this problem?

One way has been to educate the viewer. There are many places where this has worked to good effect. The beauty of classical music is lost on untrained ears, but it also means that its lovers had to learn to appreciate the music. We also see the appreciation for good typography slowly permeating the masses, as companies like apple use marketing to educate the public on the greatness of their product. What about the relentless pursuit of processing speeds of CPUs? 10 years ago a person would have waited 5~10 seconds for a webpage to load, but thru the gradual upgrade process, the users find meaningful differences in smaller and smaller timeframes. What used to be perfectly fine is now unthinkable.

Another way is to step in the shoes of the viewer, and find out what matters to him/her. This way is fraught with dangers because the viewpoint of the average public is just that – average. Companies and designers that use this way of thinking routinely end up with mediocrity or worse. The proliferation of utter shit probably exist in part because the person in charge could not tell the difference between good or bad.

What is my current solution? I feel that a designer should be able to choose which area he becomes intimately familiar with. The ideal should be to create a tool that provides rich feedback for just the area he wishes to emphasize. This way, he gets the deep depth of meaning that comes with intimacy with tools, but also shaped so that it matches what matters with the consumer.

But creating a tool is breathtakingly hard…