I notice something I keep doing by hand, and I get interested in building a system around it.
That is most of it. A pot leaves the studio and I want it to carry its own record. A list of events near me arrives every Thursday because I could not be trusted to go looking. A hunt through a hundred-year-old survey report becomes a letter, because a letter travels farther than my notes do. The system is the part I like designing: what it reads, what it decides, what it sends, and the moment it starts producing something useful with nobody in the room.
The systems are made of whatever the idea needs. Software, writing, records, clay, commerce, other people. I do not think of those as separate fields. The same way of seeing runs through all of them: find the thing that repeats, give it a rule, and let the rule carry it.
If a description is needed, creative systems designer is the simplest one.
I work with clay most days. Pennsylvania is home. Write to opensourcewarren@gmail.com, or start with Work with me.