Anyone else here not work from plans and drawings?

[sossol]

I was really good at the fabrication part of my Industrial Design schooling, but not so much the ideation part, which is where you sketch out idea, refining them in waves until you end up with either a viable idea ready for prototyping or something that the customer likes.This negatively affected my grades in that area. My ADHD brain thinks through and dismisses ideas faster than I can draw them, so I ended up with not much more than a few half-drawn sketches that are all but unrecognizable. I tried ignoring the random thoughts, but never could. A couple of times I did the sketches after the final project by remembering the ideas that I'd rejected.
With behavioral therapy I've learned how to adapt, so now I can at least draw up plans and ideate a bit. Still, most of my project plans are limited to showing the absolutes - those aspects that must be a certain way in order to do their job - leaving the rest to be at least modified to suit if not made up on the fly.

Another thing I do that may not be as strange as i think is that I'll meditate on a project, for lack of a better term. When I'm falling asleep or just resting I'll let a part of my mind work through ideas, then when I have one I think is good will imagine fabricating the entire project down to selecting the tools I'll use for each operation. Whenever this reveals a flaw I'll slip back to the ideation phase, then work back to fabricating. Rinse Repeat. Often this forms a sort of muscle memory so when I fabricate in real life I'm more or less working from memory. That it's a memory of something that hadn't happened in real life doesn't matter. When I'm awake and doing something that doesn't require much concentration I can to the above at a slower pace. Occasionally I'll have what is like an epiphany where my mind's eye presents a fully fleshed-out idea that I wasn't consciously aware that I was thinking about. I can draw it out while mentally examining (rotating, disassembling, adjusting) just as easily as if it were sitting on a table in real life.

Neil