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Comment by danybittel | Hacker News Reader

You may be exceptional.

In my experience, it often works / looks perfect in the head. But putting it to paper, it falls apart quickly. Imagine a bicycle, it is easy to imagine it accurately. Then draw it (or construct it), one usually struggles a lot. The step to materialize it, is where you need a lot of practice.

The worst are the the "idea" guys. They think they have already done all the work, and somebody else just needs to put it to paper. If you're that someone, expect lots of trial and error. He'll "know when he sees it", but can't give directions.

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Drawings of bicycles from memory, rendered in 3D:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/35437979/Velocipedia

This needs to be submitted to HN on its own. Thanks.

I imagine it will vary widely depending on the complexity of something. The more complex something is the more likely you fail to predict some things accurately, so based on this conversation it's difficult to tell whether someone is exceptional or not, as exceptional would be when you are able to do more complex designs accurately than most other folks.

Here's a story I heard about how people fail to imagine things they do daily:

Have someone who knows how to drive sit in a chair, close their eyes and pretend to be driving. Ask them to make a lane change. Most people will turn the wheel slightly, then straighten it. A real lane change requires turning the wheel in the opposite direction to keep from moving past the lane you merge into.

Being able to see details like that in your head is highly exceptional, IMO.

I find when I imagine mechanical designs I can get a reasonable intuitive grasp of mechanism and kinetics.

It might be the way my mind works but for me I "feel" the parts more then see them.

But I can't visualise with accurate dimensions, and for me I find that matters a lot in terms of manufacturability.

Even very simple designs I usually end up making several iterations on paper or in cad. It's only after dimensioning, doing some basic calculations (say, will this bit be strong enough), matching to available stock and parts, double checking the tooling I have to make sure I can actually make the things I've drawn, looking for interference and so on that I know what the design is really going to look like.

People who are really good, I think, naturally design parts to minimise setup time and with the jigs and workholding they'll need to make them in mind. I'm not there yet... I still snooker myself on workholding or order of operations reasonably often.

Obviously individual differenes matter, but OPs ability has a lot to do with practise. If you work a lot with 3D objects you will get better at imagining them in your mind.

Just remove all the parts of the stone that don’t look like the statue of David.

That’s trivially simple, right?

Well, maybe if your name is Michelangelo.

Maybe not that exceptional based on humble-brag statements like:

> Doesn't everyone do this?

Furthermore, most people hit a very real wall when trying to imagine things that are too complex, limited by their working memory.

Even Tesla might have been stretching the truth. He can "see the balance"? Right - no. Either it's balanced due to being symmetrical (both from a conventional 'visual' perspective or in mass) or it's not. It's not a thing you discover by visualization.

Furthermore, I am trying to do this with a user story at work right now, and I am realizing that it's much faster to get it down on paper than try to re-run it in my mind.

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