Jony Ive knows something.

I used to sketch all the time, and then I joined a big office and quietly stopped, not as a conscious decision, more like the environment just didn’t ask for it. Big offices have their own momentum and logic, and honestly a lot of it is genuinely impressive. The coordination and the ability to push enormous projects forward - I respect that, but somewhere along the way the sketch was lost.

Perhaps, I didn’t want to be too loud. Sketching carries a pressure that digital work doesn’t: when you draw you have to decide what matters. Reality around us is endless with detail but a sketch forces you to pick the essence, what’s ENOUGH of the space (or idea), and that’s uncomfortable.

However, I cant’s stop thinking about this: neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, who spent decades studying mirror neurons, talks about one profound idea in Mirrors in the Brain: our motor system - the part of the brain that moves the body - is how we understand the world in the first place. We perceive space through what our bodies can do with it, how we can reach into it, move through it, feel it with our hands. The motor system is not a servant of cognition; it IS cognition at its most fundamental layer.

Reality is physical, bodily, gestural and, follow the hand, our hands are guides into the territory of the deepest layers of the brain.

Draw the space and you discover what your body already knows about that space, the weight of it, the tension, the proportion that makes you feel a certain way before you can explain why. A prompt can’t access that, because words are not a spatial act.

Now I’m pushing myself back into a somewhat uncomfortable zone of picking up the pen again. And the thing is, AI makes this more urgent. The more content we can generate effortlessly, the more critical it becomes to know what to generate.

When I read about Jony Ive (allegedly) working on AI PEN, I thought omg, that guy knows something.