Design as Knowledge-Making

Why the process itself creates learning

“The most important distinction is that by ‘doing multimedia’, these students are making knowledge. There are few designers who would identify their own work as the production of knowledge, though I would argue that they should.”

— Anne Burdick, “Design Without Designers”

---

I read this and knew right away: this applies to music practice. This is saying explicitly what I’ve intuited about “why design practice”.

I continued reading, but my mind was occupied by a thought. I knew I had to get the thought into words or I might lose it. I created a first draft: “The process, methods, tools, and techniques students use to design their music practice is an ongoing foundational step to their lifelong making of music itself.”

I knew that sentence was going to need to be unpacked. So, here goes.

What That Sentence Is Really Saying

Every musician who practices well understands the virtuous cycle prepare-play-reflect. You think about what you’re working on. You play. You notice what happened. You adjust. Then you do it again. This cycle is where learning happens: where mental representations develop, where understanding deepens.

But what if you applied that same cycle—that same logic—to your whole practice life? Not just to a single repetition, but to your week, your lessons, your approach to a piece, your development as a musician?

That’s designing your practice. And here’s part of what that sentence is trying to say: it’s the same prepare-play-reflect thinking that already works in a good repetition, now scaled up and made intentional across your whole practice.

Learning Music While Designing Your Practice

To learn the design process is to learn a skill—or really, a set of interconnected skills:

• imagining possibilities

• being creative in your approach to challenges

• iterating a cycle of trying something, noticing what happens, adjusting, and trying again

• exploring and experimenting with the intention to discover

• the ability to test using this primary question: does this actually work for me?

It asks you to develop self-empathy and self-knowledge—understanding how you learn, what you actually need, and who you are as a musician.

These aren’t abstract thinking skills. They’re the core loop of creativity. They’re a recipe for engaging more fully with your own musicianship and your own self-awareness.

Applying Design to Traditional Practice

The truth is that the traditional practice of implicit learning does work. Musicians have always developed mental representations, built understanding, and grown as players by using this system. But intuitive learning leaves much to chance. You might prepare well or you might not. You might reflect deeply or you might forget to stop and just keep repeating mindlessly out of habit.

When you learn to design your practice intentionally and creatively, you are invited to apply that same prepare-play-reflect logic at increasing time scales. You’re upgrading traditional practice by being more conscious, systematic, and strategic. Rather than leaving your musical growth to chance, you’re bringing your full creativity, imagination, and growing self-awareness to bear on your own development.

And because the logic is the same at each time scale—the micro-repetition to the macro-practice design—you’re making use of concepts you already understand.

This is what Dr. Burdick was pointing to: designers don’t get taught that their work produces knowledge.

And here’s what I’m pointing to: the same is true for musicians designing their practice. When you actually do design work—when you imagine and create and iterate and test—you’re extending and amplifying your cognitive representations of the music.

And even more: you’re learning about your body and mind and how you work; about what you actually need in order to grow; about who you’re becoming as a musician.

Design work isn’t “make-work”. It adds depth and detail to your relationship with the music.

What I’m Learning From Workshop Preparation and Design

This is what I mean by “an ongoing foundational step to their lifelong making of music itself.” The design process becomes the foundation not just of how we practice, but of how we engage with music—and with learning, with creativity, with ourselves—for the rest of our lives.

As I prepare to teach students to design their own practice, I’m witnessing this idea develop. I plan to ask them to think about why they practice, what they actually need, how they learn best.

I’m not just helping them organize their time and to learn how to use the tools of music practice. I’m inviting them into a way of imagining, creating, exploring, and knowing themselves through music, and the music within themselves.

Better schedules and efficiency are important. But individual transformation comes from the creative, reflective, exploratory thinking we do as we create our own practice.

---

What would it feel like to approach one aspect of your practice this week as a creative experiment rather than an obligation?

I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments.