From Mundane to Master: Finding That Design Feeling
Most of us who want to become designers at some point pursue a major that we feel will get us to our objective. We say to ourselves “Self, I will attend school and become a great designer.” So, you begin an undergraduate program and start looking for the secret sauce, the magical tools that will make all your dreams come true. After several semesters of chopping through statics problems, analyzing glorified diving boards, and assuming all moving bodies are point masses, you may begin to question if what you are doing will help you become the demigod of design you had envisioned. My experience has shown that these exercises are generally useful so long as you maintain perspective of the exercise’s purpose.
Novices and experts in every field, whether it be driftwood art, engine design, or Lego construction, think very differently. A novice wants concrete steps that can be followed, a recipe that tells you the process from beginning to end. Experts think in the abstract and can pull concepts out of thin air to solve problems. Novices see experts and often think “But what are the secret steps?” The challenge is that experts do not think in steps, so they often struggle to communicate to novices how to solve complex problems.
It is one of the great ironies of design education that the way we TEACH design can conflict with the way we DO design. An expert has paid an awful price to be able to solve problems using abstract ideas. This toll has been paid by personally identifying true principles then repeatedly applying those principles to applications. This repetition helps the expert know what it FEELS like to do it right. While most educators know this, it can be tempting when teaching a course to lose perspective on why we are giving homework assignments or team projects. When these exercises are poorly executed, students may begin to correlate poor design instruction with design itself. As a student, it is therefore of value to recognize why there is a general emphasis on repetition of seemingly trivial exercises. Whether or not the delivery by an instructor is stellar, you can always embrace the repetition and focus on gaining experience to know what it FEELS like to do something right. These skills will then enable you to know the feeling of design.
Let me illustrate with an example. My mother makes the best dinner rolls in the world (I dare you to convince me otherwise). My grandmother makes the very same rolls, as did her mother before her. I recently took it upon myself to channel my inner grandmother and extend this great family tradition for my kids. I obtained the recipe from my mother, who kept insisting that we talk more about what it feels like to make the dough. Silly mother! I had the recipe, so I ignored her talk on feelings. I whipped some yeast, sugar, and water together, let it sit, then added the additional ingredients. After an hour, it had not risen, so I gave up and tried a week later. Same result. I called my mother who provided troubleshooting over the phone. I eventually got it to start rising, but then it was too sticky. Several attempts later, I was able to knead the dough, form it into rolls, and bake them. They came out very dry. This process of iteration continued for weeks until I finally began to understand what it felt like to make a great dinner roll.
I, like most of us, initially felt that all I needed were basic steps to TELL me how to make the bread. Unfortunately, making dinner rolls is a much more complex problem than what can be written on a piece of paper. Confounding factors, such as humidity, elevation, ambient temperature, types of yeast, water temperature, exposure to sunlight, and many other things make the creation of amazing dinner rolls a hard process to script. So why even use a recipe in the first place?! It is helpful to have somewhere to begin, somewhere that generations of grandmothers have identified as a basic framework within which you can begin to iterate. Eventually, the need for the framework diminishes as you know what it “feels” like to make the dinner rolls. I was able to go from dinner roll novice to a bakery beast by making decisions and seeing what happened. The framework (the steps) gave me a starting point that I never would have found on my own, but making things work well came from repetition.
As a new designer, it can be frustrating to chop through calculations and homework problems. However, the repetition of these exercises helps us learn the principles of design, making us able to think beyond step-by-step solutions and enabling us to think like an expert (i.e. knowing what it FEELS like to design). The overall goal of design education is to provide repetitious experience making design decisions. Some courses do this extremely well but this may not always be the case. The good news is that by remembering the intent of your coursework, you can channel those repetitious exercises to build your experience framework even if the course is not the best at doing so. By embracing the repetitious, often mundane exercises, and looking for ways to apply those lessons learned in personal ways, you will soon become the design guru you’ve envisioned.
