I will be writing 30 posts in 30 days on “design engineering.” Everyday I will dedicate myself to spending anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour writing about what I consider design engineering. This first post will go over my motivoations for doing this, what I will be writing about, and other related stuff. I do not claim these posts will be the greatest thing one will read. In fact,these are more so a personal confession, a catharsis of energy I have felt since the beginning of learning about this area of work. See my other series, ‘One Hour a Day of Design Engineering’ I did last year to learn more about my journey. Think of these pieces of writings as ramblings and confessions of a man with nothing to lose and everything to gain.
It’s also important to mention that when I say design engineering, I do not think my belief of what exactly that is is legible at the moment. It will be revealed over time to me what I take design engineering to be, or ought to be. For now, I like to think of it as product design, interface design, and the engineering required to make those two things come alive.
My motivation for doing this series is best communicated by presenting thoughts and ideas from others that I’ve grown to like over time and giving a brief explanation for why exactly I think the quote is applicable here. So, let’s do that.
When you go deep, probing the assumptions, looking from multiple angles, and reformulating things in your own words, the ideas become part of you. This is one of the reasons why I write. When I unpack things fully, the ideas become objects that I can rotate in my mind. The subconscious can draw parallels that it can't if the ideas haven't been thoroughly unpacked.
There is a line from Oscar Wilde that gets at this, when he says that to write well, all you need to do is develop your mind and then write what you see. If you have thought deeply, nearly everything looks interesting.
Interesingly, writing is also a way to think. Writing is also a way to commuicate ideas. Both of these things are true which results in a type of meriyad of writing that is both seens as a public display of epeistmic humility and a great enternaminent piece for the audience. Because at the end of the day, what the audience comes away with is not the content itself that is how it is placed in the writer’s mind, but rather the content that is placed in their own mind. Particularly, the line from Oscar Wilde has always stuck with me. Perception is a lens and if your perception is both informed and intersting, all things become informed and interesting. Objects and things cannot be seperated from the perciever so this only makes sense. “If you have thought deeply nearly everything looks interesting.” There’s a side to this quote that I like in that it places agency on the perciever to create beauty wherte msot people might not see any. This gives the common person a certain type of power they might not realize they have, but it seems most highly intellgent people can wield this sort of power, a sword of interestingness, with precision and delicacy. This then is the point of my writing here; to wield the sword of interestingness in service towards growth and finding discoveries that otherwise would not have been made by simply milling around with so-called useless thoughts.
once again discovering that a few minutes of thinking through a problem on paper was more effective than vaguely ruminating about it in my mind for weeks
This one is self-explantory. Writing is a form of making thoughts and ideas legible through a means of distilling vague fragments of insights into an objectified form. Also, writing helps with memory and unserstanding. The more we can memorize and understand, the more we can create things that are better, higher quality, and more innovative.
For mathematics, it seems that writing has always been an indispensable means, regardless of who is "doing maths": doing maths is above all writing (33). The same is undoubtedly true of any work of discovery in which the intellect plays a major role. But surely this is not necessarily the case with "meditation", by which I mean the work of self-discovery. In my case, however, and up to now, writing has been an effective and indispensable way of meditation. As in mathematical work, it is the material support that sets the rhythm of thinking, and serves as a reference point and rallying point for an attention that otherwise tends to scatter into the winds. Also, writing gives us a tangible trace of the work that has just been done to which we can refer at any time. In a long-term meditation, it is often useful to be able to refer also to the written traces which testify to such and such a moment of the meditation in the previous days, or even years.
This one I believe is also self-explanatory – and probably my favorite snippet about writing here. Above all, intectual work is writing. And whaty else is writing but dedicated moments of gathering attention on an object of thought. This object then can be inspected and played with, like a child would a toy. Writing is play. Fourently, play provides us with a set of rules that epxectations are a bureden and this is what typically leads to the best work.
In science an eminent achievement nearly always corresponds to a new theory or idea presented in the written publication of a persuasive argument. The deliberate activities that are necessary for producing such a rare result consist of focused and extended work developing and refining generated theoretical solutions to selected general problems. We believe that during the process of writing scientists develop and externalize their arguments.
In support of the importance of writing as an activity, Simonton (1988) found that eminent scientists produce a much larger number of publications than other scientists. It is clear from biographies of famous scientists that the time the individual spends thinking, mostly in the context of writing papers and books, appears to be the most relevant as well as demanding activity. Biographies report that famous scientists [like Darwin, Pavlov, and Skinner] adhered to a rigid daily schedule where the first major activity of each morning involved writing for a couple of hours.
In a large questionnaire study of science and engineering faculty, Kellogg (1986) found that writing on articles occurred most frequently before lunch and that limiting writing sessions to a duration of 1-2 hr was related to higher reported productivity.
Self-explanatory again. I love this paper. I want to be great. This seems like it requires lots of writing. It’s that simple. Okay maybe not that simple but just writing everyday is that simple.
Do 100 Crappy Things For No Reason, With No Agenda To Live Up To, At Whatever Pace Feels Comfortable, However You Like.
Well, here I am. But this time it’s 30 things. But it very well could turn into 100 things.
You only close the gap between what you make and the image of perfection in your mind with a sea of imperfect work.
Related as this quote is in the Visa ‘Do 100 Things’ post, but I guess these pieces of writing are me closing the gap between by taste and my actual work by doing a ton of imperfect work.
When you practice something repeatedly, it becomes easier to repeat what you practiced. Activities that used to require attention are promoted to effortless muscle memory.
In truth, things are less conceptually complex. Your model of yourself, your felt sense of who you are, the thing that feels irreducibly you, arises from what you practice.
Practice shows up nearly everywhere in life, in habits and patterns, in every virtue and every vice. Honesty is practised; so is defensiveness. If you feel yourself reaching for a lie or deflection, it’s because you’ve trained that muscle very well.
Wrtiing is a form of practice. Not only do you practice writing skills themsevles when you write (vocab, prose, etc), but you practice spending your attention on things in different ways. As it is, writing is simply an output of the function of attention. It’s alsmot like a form of prayer. And as we write more and more and focus our attention on objects we’d like to think about, our mind grows stronger with every paragraph. Not only in intecultal ways, but in the way we pay attention to things. And after all, attention is all we have.
Okay at this point I’m just gonna throw in a bunch of stuff and hopefully you catch my vibe (ironically, this is me outsourcing my thinking to others which is exaclty what I don’t want to be doing when writing but hopefully this first post can break the rules).
Write regularly, and learn to ‘think in writing’. This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether you want to publish or not. Just have a Google Doc in which you add a page a day of whatever’s on your mind. This has a million benefits, but a simple one is just clearing your cache: if you don’t do this, your brain sort of gets clogged by all the things you have on your mind, whereas if you ‘empty’ your brain onto a page that creates room for new thoughts.
If you really want to be a clear thinker, you need to learn to ‘think in writing’.
Writing about technical things is underrated. Shows you can be articulate (majorly important) and demonstrates tech ability.
When I am curious about something, mathematical or otherwise, I question[interroge] it. I question it, without caring if my question is perhaps stupid or if it will appear so, without it being carefully weighed. Often the question takes the form of an assertion - an assertion which, in truth, is a knocking probe. I will then believe more or believe less in the assertion, which depends of course on where I stand in the comprehension of the things I'm looking at. Often, especially at the beginning of a research, the assertion is completely false - but this still had to be done to convince yourself. Often, it suffices to write it down for it to become obvious that it is false, whereas before writing it down there was a vagueness[flou], like an uneasiness[malaise], instead of obviousness. It then enables us to return to the probing with less ignorance, with a question-assertion that is perhaps a little less "off the mark". More often still, the affirmation taken literally turns out to be false, but the intuition which, still clumsily, tries to convey itself through this is correct, though remaining vague. This intuition will, little by little, be decanted from an equally shapeless gangue of false or inadequate ideas, it will gradually emerge from the limbo of the misunderstood which only asks to be understood, of the unknown which only asks to be known, to take a form which is her own, to refine and sharpen its contours, as the questions I ask of these things in front of me become more precise or more pertinent, to surround them more and more closely.
writing increases serendipity when working. in a way, you hit more landmines so to speak. you access and come across more ideas you otherwise would not have.
I suppose my goal for this series is to make my thoughts and ideas legible in a manner that I can correctly charctaerize them into what is trash. And most will be trash, but the trash still needs to exist. Because at the top of the pile of trash is green. That’s where the trees grow, at the top of the massive pile of trash that has accumlated after much hard work and deliberating with yourself over trivial things. However, these so called trivial things are not actually trivial but rather small. Small things have the power to compound from trash into green which is what I am attempting to cultivate.