Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:13
I've developed a way of working to make this huge project of a world history of design manageable I've been collecting files for years and
00:00:26
I've organized all that material into groupings by countries so that when I begin to work on a chapter I have a file of material that I can start with I've also been collecting bibliographies for
00:00:40
many many years and have managed to put those into categories for each chapter so that when I begin a chapter I've got a bibliography already and then I do
00:00:53
some more research and add to it then i download articles put them in files so I begin with a large amount of information and then I just spend a period reading
00:01:05
and as I'm reading I extract information and write it down on these 5x7 note cards so the note cards become actually the kind of outline of what I think the
00:01:19
chapter will be about because I've already pulled things from the readings that I think are going to be important for me so I have these note cards and then the next step for me is to sit down
00:01:33
at the dining room table with a huge pad of newsprint and actually map out the chapter in a visual form I've always been interested in graphic design and
00:01:46
mapping and this visualizing technique really helps me to organize the information so I go through the note cards and I transfer material from the cards to these sheets of paper in a
00:02:01
nonlinear way and then I see how things cluster and out of these diagrams and clusters I begin to now think of them in some kind
00:02:13
of linear narrative form so I put the diagrams up on the wall and when I sit down to write I have the note cards and the diagrams and I move back and forth
00:02:26
between them as I start to write the chapter and then of course as I begin to write a story begins to emerge because in fact I've already rehearsed this
00:02:39
story in several different ways by getting the information for the cards mapping it out and of course the writing is then the third way of telling the story the one that will ultimately
00:02:52
result in the finished chapters
End of transcript