This is personal. As someone who had a flash of insight into how software works, and how when I was 16, I shifted my thinking to do it, I deeply believe that a mental reorientation is required to do software, data analytics or any "tech" or "hard science" well. It was my professional life.
I've watched people work in software development and database groups for years and always be struggling. Their code worked but never very well and they were often stressed out. I've seen others write code as a kind of poetry, a structure that flows from them. The same with people who get databases and how to design them, how to extract information and meaning from all those 0's and 1's. I've seen it with friends who are mathematicians and physicists.
These technical areas are design spaces, like the art spaces that Keith Sawyer writes about. They are disciplines that train the mind and change how our minds work.
There is something special to art in how the process of making becomes the path to knowing. It's not unique to art, it could apply to communicating with someone, of navigating through moments of confusion, when what one person says lands differently for the other, the "failure" to communicate could become an entry way to a deeper understanding of difference and connection, or it could become part of a larger disconnect.
I'm reading Sawyer's Learning to See to further make that shift in my art making.
[see also Keith Sawyer's substack. Lots of good stuff.]
