Start Designing
It's not make-work, it's making knowledge
Inhibition
I can understand why “designing music practice” can sound like busywork. You just want to practice better. Learning to play music is challenging enough and making time is already a struggle. “Design” feels like more distraction and complication.
I get it. I’ve been there. For years, every activity that kept me from the practice room felt like time I wasn’t getting better, or not getting ready for the next big thing.
Until I discovered something that changed my assumptions about what practice can be.
Insight
In “Design Without Designers”, Anne Burdick changed my assumption.
“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.”
The same applies to musicians. Designing music practice makes knowledge for the designer. The act of engaging with the music through the process of design (imagining, creating, testing, iterating) changes the meaning of the music for you. You have a new relationship with both the music (your mental representations of it) and with yourself (how you work, what you need, what you’re becoming).
This is the most significant insight. Design isn’t busywork. Design develops your capacity to learn and make music. You are making yourself into the musician you imagine yourself to be.
Here’s how I got this insight. Early in developing my design practice, I discovered that the time I spent thinking through my practice, documenting what worked, and reflecting on what happened was paying off far beyond the time I invested. The benefit to my learning and enjoyment exceeded the ‘cost’ of the design work itself. And, I wouldn’t have learned this without actually doing it. The designing process taught me about how I learn in ways that no one could have told me in advance.
Initiation
This is reimagining. Practice becomes creative, playful activity. Rather than attempting to input the music like data points into your system as quickly as possible, take time to develop a relationship with it. Ask questions. Listen to what it tells you. Literally. Listen; and keep asking. You will get to know the music as you would someone you deeply care for.
This is design: imagining, creating, playing; over and over again.
The Starter Kit1 shows you specific ways to do this. But you can start anywhere.
Don’t wait to be told. Follow your feeling, intuition, or any ideas that come to mind.
This is an opportunity to make your practice yours.
I love this reframing (or remaining!) of design. Design doesn't have to be boring, tedious busy work. But instead, It can be creative and playful (I think of interior design over spreadsheets). Fluid and responsive, as opposed to rigid and overly structured.
My big takeaway: It is important to have a design in order to make progress, but making that design work for me is how I will ensure I actually execute on it.
Progresses depends so much on how we define our terms and how we dedicate ourselves to employing them. Choose what practice can be, choose your future.