Accumulation is not a substitute for creative work

This note draws on Andy Matuschak’s recognition of a need for serious contexts of use:

• Effective system design requires insights drawn from serious contexts of use
• Tool-makers usually lack connection to a serious context of use

The fire hose of media we’re confronted with today presses myself and others toward a kind of ad-hoc librarianship. A desire emerges to capture something irreducible from the mayhem in front of us. This is part earnest belief in its potential and part desire to assert control in a frenetic environment.

This work can be useful. A curatorial eye can guide the explorative work of iterative creativity but, without a view to a meaningful context of use it’s just more existential wheel spin that merely pacifies — rather than satisfies — the creative instinct.

Rather than ”getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction”, the theoretical, it is the work itself that represents meaningful progress.

Immersion in the creative act is far more potent than preparation for the creative act,

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
— David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear, 1985

As the composer might see the music of a busy street, we can only make meaning by attempting to apply the clarity afforded by a specific lens on the world around us, situated in a practice oriented toward specific outcomes.

Cycles of broad review, funnelling to periods of focused research, ultimately producing discrete creative artefacts.

In that flow, it is the tangible artefact that is most important, where the stages of review and research are mere supporting roles.

Thinking about stuff is not doing stuff.
— Campbell Walker, The drawing advice that changed my life, struthless, 2020

Related: Quotes are not notes