A psychologist knows the mind,
like an engineer knows the violin.
With precise specifications, they describe mechanics.
They know what makes possible the music.

A designer know the mind,
Like a musician know the violin.
They know it via intuition, not mechanics.
They feel the resonance, they make it sing.

* * *

I had that thought last night while thinking about why I feel so uncomfortable with the label designer.  I am that engineer, and I am that psychologist - I am not the violinist, not the designer.  I am not saying that rational approach to understanding is not valuable, but I am recognizing its limits.

The engineer know the violin mechanistically - the engineer doesn’t know how to make it sing. The engineer can’t learn to make it sing through the methodologies of engineering, no matter how exhaustive. More precision about the vibration characters, more mechanically explanation of how the sound is created will not help the engineer play the violin.

To learn to play the violin, one must simply pick it up, and play. And play and play and play. Keeping it under your chin as often as you can, and pushing through the ten thousand hours of practise, trial and error, absorbing the violin through all the unconscious and intuitive mechanisms of the mind - that’s what will teach the engineer to play the violin.

The engineer must become a violinist.

I think what I must do is to put my design intuition through ten thousand hours of use. Ten thousand hours of seeing and intuiting, hearing and intuiting. To practise intuition might be to press my hears hard against my heart, and listen to why it beats.

Perhaps this quote from Einstein sums it up:

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Rationality really has served me well, but it is time I appreciate and put to good use that gift of intuition.