I quite enjoy the evaluation step, where key metrics are observed, and projects either make or break. In the spirit of iterative design philosophy, I think that in some ways, the project doesn’t even truly begin until there are evaluation statistics to consider and a new iteration is in the headlights.
Now that we’re on the tail end of the creative problem solving process as defined by this curriculum, I’m struck by how several of the steps along the way can have a recursive quality - for each step, you can apply the entire process! For this step, coming up with an effective criteria requires ideation, selection, implementation, and then you have to evaluate how effective your criteria were as this chapter itself has described.
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Also, for those that disagree with my comments on the “iterate vs. masterpiece” discussion: First of all, I’m sorry that you have to be subjected to my rants on zoom - it’s not easy to convey potentially disagreeable points of view with such haste. Second, I think this subject is one of those things where you can turn the “iterate” dial up so high that it eventually goes all the way around and back to “Masterpiece.”
To continue to take the “David” example for instance... to us, it seems to be a complete masterpiece. It took 26 year old Michelangelo 2 years to carve out of a singular block of marble. Marble was so expensive at the time that it took the government’s special order to just get a block big enough for the commission... meaning, there was zero room for iteration - it was a job only a master could do.
However... to Michelangelo, David was only one in a series the dozens of enormous efforts in master works he created during his lifetime. To a student, impossible, but to him, It was just another iteration (an iteration of his process, not of a singular work). Masters come to the table having iterated and failed more times than an amateur has ever attempted.
This is all to say, that this discussion is one purely of perspective. If iterating is the only means to become a master, and masters are only iterating on their processes, is there even really such a thing as a masterpiece? Is it just a matter of scale? If you’re already comfortable with being a “fierce iterator” where you accept that no design is ever complete... is it so wrong to have the mindset of a master? Is there even a difference between a fierce iterator and a master?
Perhaps what I’m really describing and getting caught on here is the leap from design/pre-production into production/construction... this is a dichotomy that often crosses my mind as a software developer. Iterate a million times in design, so that when it comes time to CREATE the design, you can produce that masterpiece. In this example, the students are kind of designing and creating at the same time.
In the spirit of this chapter on “Evaluation,” the criteria for success makes such a difference here. I think that in a vacuum, the ceramic students trying to produce an arbitrarily “high quality” ceramic via constant iteration may create the most commercially viable, most structurally tested, most mass-appeal, most generically applicable ceramic... but it is not likely that they create the most provocative, most illustrious, most unique, most full-scale, most detailed, most emotional... etc. Those types of qualities arise from masterful vision, pre-meditation, and singular execution.
At the end of the day, this program is about divergent thinking. That means rejecting certain established truths - in my mind, that absolutely includes this curriculum. I don’t hesitate to find valid opposing points for platitudes like the “masterpiece vs iteration” ceramics thought experiment.