If you get an Internal Server Error like me:
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20230114194140/https://ralphammer.com/how-to-draw-ideas/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20230114194140/https://ralphammer...</a>
Very fun! I’ve found sketching and journaling super valuable.<p>I follow the methods from <a href="https://bulletjournal.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bulletjournal.com/</a><p>My journal is full of different layouts, diagrams, decision making tables, for example doing a quick SWOT analysis on paper by diving a page into 4.<p>Paper is good and helpful for the process.<p>I’m continually trying to produce ‘evergreen notes” and writing on paper helps me push towards that a bit. (<a href="https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes" rel="nofollow">https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes</a>)
i had a conversation yesterday with accomplished engineers from vmware and openai.<p>pen, paper, and whiteboards have been invaluable tools for them, but they were surprised to find that out in hindsight.<p>we discussed about the counter-intuitive short-comings of digital tools: a lack of contraints constraints creativity. digital whiteboards like figma have infinite canvases; most to-do list apps have infinite lists. but, a sticky note has so much space before you run out of it, so you intuitively think... maybe i should not keep adding tasks to this thing.<p>there is also the aspect of object permanence and the link between memory and multi-modal sensory stimuli. in other words, if you can feel the thing, you can remember the thing better.
I love this! I especially love Ralph’s clarity of thought and his delivery of complex ideas through such simple writings and drawings.<p>And the best part is: I can imagine how much work each one of his article takes! Mainly because I have tried writing in a manner similar to Ralph’s myself [1], and I found it is not easy to articulate complex topics in an easy-to-digest manner. Drawings help to lower the barrier to understanding, and Ralph knows this very well.<p>[1]: <a href="https://zineanteoh.com/the-colors-we-paint-of-others" rel="nofollow">https://zineanteoh.com/the-colors-we-paint-of-others</a><p>* for the enjoyment of HN community, i share my blog publicly for the first time. the pw is ‘thelittleprince’
FTA:<p>--------------------------------<p>After we have taken in as much information as possible, we now want to go “crazy” and draw as many ideas as possible.<p>But what if our mind goes blank and we don’t have any?<p>Then we still need to draw.<p>Ok, but what?<p>Anything! Just put that pen on the paper and keep it moving. Scribble, make random marks and shapes. This will kickstart our visual thinking process.
rough sketches<p>And what are we thinking about? New plant pots of course! We draw everything that comes to mind. Everything! Those drawings just keep pouring from our mind through our hands on that sheet of paper. We have created a loop where our imaginations turn into drawings and those drawings initiate new imaginations.<p>--------------------------------<p>This is eerily similar to (my understanding) of how AI image generation works.
Original substack article here: <a href="https://ralphammer.substack.com/p/how-to-draw-ideas" rel="nofollow">https://ralphammer.substack.com/p/how-to-draw-ideas</a><p>with a bunch of other good ones too - like The Creative Switch
My dev team has now spent more of their career without physical whiteboarding and seems to think of it as a waste of time, so I'm looking for more guides like this, as well as explanation of the psycho-mechanics of why this works.<p>My understanding is that we think in abstract (we'll say "shapes"), and then to interface with the world, we learn language to bucket objects into words and compost them to describe the "shapes".<p>I leverage visuals heavily whenever speaking with others (Miro, physical paper or whiteboards), and have trouble communicating with (smart) people who can hold a lot in their head while speaking at length about it without providing concrete references. The transformative process of people getting their thoughts out on paper means
1. they can share context and aren't referring to their "shapes" referentially in their head
2. more than 1 person can see their thoughts concretized and can share context, discuss, and re-shape the thoughts
3. the act of reabsorbing the concrete representation reveals incompleteness that others can contribute to (edge cases, weird use cases)