Tracy Hazzard met her husband at Rhode Island School of Design on their first day. What stayed with her wasn’t any particular technique—it was the philosophy embedded in how designers are trained.

When the first computers showed up at the school, they didn’t even know how to teach it yet. So you get those tools and you start layering them into your process. Then you learn how to break it and make something your own. That’s where your art, your style, your uniqueness comes through. But if you didn’t have that foundation, you don’t really have a right to jump to those other things—it just doesn’t work out most often.

Art schools call it Freshman Foundations. Everyone learns the same basics—drawing, line, structure, form—regardless of whether they’ll end up in animation or textile design. Only after mastering these fundamentals can you meaningfully break the rules.

Here’s the counterintuitive part: this isn’t about limiting creativity. It’s about making creativity possible.

We tend to think of spontaneity and structure as opposites. The truly free conversation, in this view, is one unencumbered by rules—just pure, unfiltered expression. But Hazzard is pointing to something artists and designers learn early: genuine spontaneity requires having internalized the basics first. You can’t meaningfully break rules you never learned. You can only flail.

Consider what happens in conversation when someone hasn’t internalized fundamentals like listening before responding, or staying with a topic long enough to develop it, or allowing silence when it’s needed. Their attempts at spontaneity don’t read as creative freedom—they read as chaos. The conversation lurches without rhythm. Topics scatter before they can deepen. What looks like freedom is actually a kind of imprisonment in reaction.

But someone who has internalized conversational foundations can improvise genuinely. They know when a pause creates space versus when it creates awkwardness. They can follow an unexpected tangent because they understand how to return. They break patterns deliberately rather than accidentally. Their spontaneity serves the dialogue rather than disrupting it.

Hazzard connects this to an interview she did with Steve Wozniak, who told her that innovation comes from “understanding deeply how something works and then figuring out a new way around it.” The breakthrough doesn’t emerge from ignorance of the standard approach—it emerges from such thorough knowledge of that approach that you can see what it’s missing.

This has implications for how we think about developing conversational skill. The goal isn’t to memorize rules and follow them robotically. But it’s also not to abandon structure in favor of pure instinct. It’s to practice the basics until they disappear into muscle memory, freeing attention for genuine presence and response.

The foundation doesn’t constrain your voice. It’s what allows your voice to come through at all.

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Deconstructed with Tracy Hazzard,” published April 28, 2025.