All Design Is Redesign: A Little Encouragement for Those Who Keep Trying

 All Design Is Redesign: A Little Encouragement for Those Who Keep Trying

Creativity may not be something we either have or do not have. Perhaps it is something we build—one attempt, one revision, and one imperfect beginning at a time.

Recently, I came across a short video featuring Dr. Li Jiang, the director of Stanford AIRE—AI, Robotics and Education.

The video was only a few minutes long, but one sentence stayed with me:

“All design is redesign.”

It sounds simple, but it quietly changed the way I think about creativity.

Many of us want to be creative. We admire people who write beautiful stories, compose music, design meaningful products, or build something entirely new. From a distance, creativity can look like a special gift given only to certain people. It can seem as though creative people simply receive brilliant ideas while the rest of us sit in front of an empty page, waiting for inspiration to arrive.

But creativity may not work that way at all.

Creativity Is Not a Perfect First Answer

In the Stanford talk, Dr. Jiang explains that creativity is not the ability to produce an original and perfect answer in a single moment.

It is the ability to think, try, observe what is not working, make changes, and try again.

A first idea does not need to be extraordinary. It only needs to give us something to work with.

We make a draft.
We notice what feels incomplete.
We change a sentence, a color, a shape, or a direction.
Then we create another version.

Through that process, the idea slowly becomes better.

This is encouraging because it means creativity is not reserved for people who were born unusually talented. It can also be developed through attention, patience, curiosity, and repeated effort.

Perhaps creativity is not a mysterious spark we must wait for.

Perhaps it is a practice.

What “All Design Is Redesign” Means to Me

The phrase does not mean that nothing is original. It means that creative work rarely appears fully formed.

Everything we make is influenced by something we have already seen, learned, experienced, loved, questioned, or misunderstood. We combine those pieces with our own perspective and then shape them into something new.

The first version may be awkward. The second may still not feel right. The third may reveal a possibility we could not see at the beginning.

That is not evidence that we lack creativity.

That is creativity happening.

This thought gives me comfort as I continue building my own small creative life—writing blog posts, experimenting with images, learning about music, developing business ideas, and trying things I have never done before.

Sometimes the process feels slow. Sometimes I create something and immediately see everything that could have been better. At other times, I wonder whether I am making any real progress at all.

But perhaps progress is not always found in producing a perfect result.

Sometimes progress is simply being willing to return to the work.

Learning Beyond the Walls of a University

I also felt grateful while watching this short talk.

Most of us will never sit inside a Stanford classroom. We may not have access to its courses, professors, studios, or academic community. Yet today, we can still encounter some of the core ideas being discussed there.

A short public video cannot replace a full university course. But it can give us one concentrated idea—one small piece of knowledge that opens a new way of thinking.

That is one of the remarkable gifts of our time.

We can listen to educators, researchers, writers, artists, and thinkers from around the world. We can pause, replay, take notes, ask questions, and apply what we learn to our own ordinary lives.

We may not receive the entire Stanford experience, but we can still receive a valuable seed from it.

And sometimes one good idea is enough to begin something.

Creativity in the Age of AI

This message feels especially important now.

AI can produce answers, images, summaries, music, and countless variations with astonishing speed. It is tempting to believe that our role is becoming smaller—or that we must compete with machines by working even faster.

But our most meaningful contribution may not be speed.

We still decide what deserves to be made. We notice human needs, emotions, contradictions, beauty, and meaning. We choose which questions matter. We evaluate what AI produces and decide what should be kept, changed, or rejected.

AI may help us generate possibilities, but we remain responsible for direction, judgment, purpose, and truthfulness.

The goal is not simply to ask AI for an answer and accept whatever appears. We can use it as part of the creative process: to explore, question, compare, revise, and help us see possibilities we might otherwise have missed.

The technology may be new, but the human practice remains familiar:

We begin.
We observe.
We revise.
We learn.
We begin again.

For Anyone Who Is Still Trying

I wish this idea made the work effortless—but it does not.

I still have to show up. I still have to keep learning, experimenting, and practicing. I still have to face the uncomfortable space between what I imagine and what I am currently able to create.

But now that space feels a little less discouraging.

It is not proof that I should stop.

It is the place where redesign begins.

So if your first attempt did not become what you hoped, perhaps you do not need to call yourself uncreative. You may simply be looking at the first version.

Keep it.

Study it.

Change one thing.

Then make the next version.

Creativity may not be the gift of always knowing what to do. It may be the courage to keep working with what we have until something better begins to emerge.

We are not required to create a masterpiece in one moment.

We are only invited to continue.

All design is redesign—and perhaps all creative lives are, too.

Tata, HappyKay.

Source

This reflection was inspired by Dr. Li Jiang’s talk, “Survival Strategies in the Era of AI Taught by Stanford”⁠. Dr. Jiang is associated with Stanford AIRE—AI, Robotics and Education. Additional background is available through Stanford AIRE⁠ and his Stanford University profile⁠.

Editorial Note

This post is a personal reflection inspired by the ideas presented in the referenced talk. It is not an official transcript, summary, or publication of Stanford University or Stanford AIRE.

The experiences, interpretations, and opinions expressed here are my own. AI was used as an editorial and creative tool to help organize and refine my original reflections and to create the accompanying image. I encourage readers to watch the original video for the speaker’s complete message and context.