Wouldn’t it be cool if…?

Posted 12 hours ago

One of the greatest limitations as a creative is bringing an idea from your head into reality. And many times the things that are limiting us are our abilities to draw or represent our ideas well. I know that was the case for me when I was in college.

I studied architecture. And one of the things I struggled most with is how to communicate the ideas that I had in my head. My sketching skills were not that good. I envy people who can bring things to life with a pencil and paper. I remember one of my first classes, we had to go outside and sketch some of the buildings on campus. I was always frustrated. I had a poor sense of proportion when making a sketch. My drawings didn’t look very realistic.

The same was true with trying to sketch out ideas for my projects. I was quick to try to move into using my t-square and draw things out because I was much better at that sort of drawing. But that didn’t always translate as well either.

The friction in my process was my ability to draw.

I started thinking about this after reading Brad Frost’s post, The Creative Infinite, last week. I had already been thinking about the word friction due to some other posts I had read earlier in the week. Brad’s post caused me to stop and think about the moment that we are living in now.

We now have the technology that removes a lot of the barriers or friction from being able to pursue a creative idea. That is an amazing thing to think about. Brad used the example of creating a video game with his 8 year old daughter. In less than a half hour, they had a working game based on her ideas. That is incredible. As Brad ponders in his post, there is probably no greater time in history to have the thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if..?”

And just like Brad, I want to set aside all of the concerns I have about AI tools for a moment. And there are many of them. But just for a moment, I want to exercise my capacity for wonder and acknowledge what an incredible time this is. I appreciated Nolan Lawson challenging me to this idea a month ago. Because I will admit, I have felt frustrated, irritated, mad, powerless, and threatened as I think about AI tools. There are so many things I have a problem with. And yet, the child in me can still be awed and be in wonder at the possibilities that these tools bring with them.

These tools can reduce the friction for a lot of people who have a creative idea but lack the skills, knowledge, or resources to make their idea a reality. That is a pretty cool thing. It could also be a scary thing depending on intentions but I don’t want to go there in this musing.

I wonder what kind of things my younger self could have created if I had the tools that would have helped give shape to a lot of the ideas I had in my head but struggled to bring into reality due to my limitation of skills?

I want to make a small disclaimer. I am still in process thinking about this. One thing I wished my younger self had done was to try and to practiced more on developing those sketching skills. I gave up too quickly. I also wish I had understood that not all sketches had to be a work of art. Some very basic sketches can still communicate an idea and can give the basis to try a lot of different ideas in the early stages of a design. I learned that later in life through Mike Rohde and sketchnotes.

One of my fears with some of these new tools is that people will give up or not even try to develop new skills because the technology can do it for them. I struggle with that myself in certain areas of my own craft.

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