Human beings have this thing where repeating a behavior causes you to get better at it. Not sure what it is called. Anyway, I don't have it. I have repeated the heck out of the behavior called 'school' and don't seem to be getting better at it. Oh I can crank out a case write-up in decreasing amounts of time and act like an academic with the best of them, but I have stopped feeling like 'man, I am getting smart' the way I did Fall A last year or MEng year. I sat this morning for four hours working on an ops case that really I knew the answer to, but I could not recall how to manipulate standard deviations to make the numbers reflect this. Somewhere, in my past, I have a deep-rooted and serious math malaise which causes me to hemorrhage number knowledge at an alarming rate.
Last night I had to go to art school for wood shop. For real! It's kinda fun getting down and dirty making a spoon from a block of wood, but that's not my point. My point is that designers - real black-shirt every day designers - can talk for hours about virtually nothing. There has to be a better way to teach than spending 15 minutes on the efficacy of the handle. I worked with a designer who didn't wear black shirts and he'd just go into his office for an hour and come back with the world's coolest proverbial spoon... why can't all design just be silent and amazing?
Tuesday, September 19, 2006