Over the past few days, I have heard students and colleagues say a variation of the following: I don’t know enough to start designing yet. I don’t think that there is a threshold of knowledge that must be passed before one can start designing.
If I’ve got an idea, I can go ahead and make paper sketches or a rough clickable prototype. Then, I enter in a dialogue with these things. Donald Schön and Herbert Simon both wrote about this dialogue. Schön called it a “reflective conversation,” and Simon referred to it as “cyclical interaction.” You can read more about it here.
Reflective conversations give me ideas and inspiration and help me generate questions that I need to answer through research. I can even put my sketches in front of others to facilitate useful critique sessions. You can read or talk to people before you start designing, but you don’t have to do it this way. Designing is a way to figure out what you need to know in order to design more. You can always start designing.