When we attempt imagine how things will be in any yet to be accessed arena, we are destined to do so incompletely. We may have an educated guess, but it remains a guess. When I imagined what grad school would do for me, I missed at least one key detail.
Misunderstanding #1: I imagined grad school would be a place to dig deeply into a subject of choice.
So far I have been executing one task after another in rapid succession. This pace almost guarantees that none of the work I am doing has any chance of being a thorough and quality piece. It is odd. I don't see the value in this yet. I have a friend pursuing a Masters in Architecture at UW. I recall him telling me as much about his education there. At the time, I think I understood it relative to my undergrad in sculpture. There is something magical about pumping out massive quantities of work. It forces you to move beyond all sorts of fears and little unseen traps. But it doesn't necessarily equate to quality work. Instead it is about developing a process.
I've touched the surface of Illustrator, In Design, Rhino and even ventured slightly into Processing. In one class I was even asked to execute what anyone would recognize as a drawing 101 exercise (I dropped that class). Perhaps what we are doing here is necessary but I am not sold on it yet.
I am extremely busy. I've been doing homework 7 days a week since August and none of that work is good enough to be put in a portfolio. But here is what is happening now. I am learning a new process. I have designed things for myself in the past and I have a bias towards this. There is value in pursuing a personal vision, but there is another kind of value in pursuing new understandings of people.
Design Research comes in at this point. It is considered a newish field and is really an outgrowth of successful systems applied in huge design firms like FROG and IDEO. It employs all sorts of data collection techniques intended to help a design team discover unseen needs. It has a strong capitalist drive underlying its intention. Though I am told it can be applied to anything, it is essentially always looking for marketable opportunities.
Design Research is a required course. It has been a bumpy ride so far. I am not sure yet how it will serve me, but I have the sensation I am learning something there.
Yes. Probably learning a process is the right way to think about it. My biggest complaint with school is definitely not having enough time to do things as thoroughly as I would like. But maybe there's a practical side to that. Because, from everything I'd heard, that's what it's like in practice in the real world. And a design profession is a strange combination of art and business. Those who are more artistically inclined always risk letting their perfectionist side take hold and working on something so long that all the profit is eaten up. It's necessarily a flawed thing, a mash of whatever you can get out under the circumstances, done as well as you can do it. It's a lot more satisfying to do work for yourself and not have to make money at it, but that's not why we're going to grad school, is it?
ReplyDeleteRight. I think that is one of the things I learned the hard way when I was painting portraits and such. I was obsessed with the perfection of the things, yet in the end I was failing in a business sense. When I met John Rizzotto I started to see how a true professional works; extremely fast. He poured as much attention into his final product as he did in the efficiencies of his systems.
Delete