http://www.good.is/post/teach-design-think-dumb/How designers are introducing the idea of “simple” to a group of high school students.
“People who think that small (dumb) things don’t matter have never slept in a room with a mosquito.” This is the mantra I’ve always used with my university students. It gets their attention, and it's a good way to look at the world we inhabit and the things we create. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but simple is just too complicated. We’ve all heard the saying “simplicity isn’t simple,” so to make things simple, I call simple “dumb.”
First let's be clear, dumb is not "stupid" because dumb, like stem cells, binary code, or tofu, can become just about anything. The beauty of dumb is that it is generally free, accessible and transferable. Dumb is playful and innocent. Dumb is digital thinking about our analog world. Dumb is bottom-up and networked. Dumb is open-source, modular, and scalable. And when it comes to working with material stuff, dumb turns out to be really smart.
It seems that when people go to college, especially design school, they become enamored with the obtuse and the complicated (which are often mistaken for the intricate and complex). I won’t go into what typically happens to design student’s expectations after they graduate into the “real” world (yikes), and their desire to make a meaningful impact on the world we live in is not a bad thing, of course. In fact, it is at the core of our
TeachDesign program. However, students often go through complicated loops to generate complicated outcomes in their quest to make this impact. But as scientists, programmers, mathematicians, engineers, and toddlers have so often modeled: You can use the simple to achieve the elegant.
Why all this dumb talk again? I’m thinking about dumb again these days because our students in our TeachDesign program at McCallum High School have stumbled onto dumb methods and dumb materials to help them achieve their project goals. They’ve done this because they are unaware of the affinity for the complicated that awaits them once they begin university. They are using dumb materials and methods because, as I mentioned, dumb is free and available.
Our good friend and TeachDesign colleague, Chris Robbins, is somewhat of a Freegan,
opposing wastefulness whenever possible. His compulsion was our students’ good fortune when he showed up to our first concrete test-pour with rubber-backed carpet remnants along with two boxes made from reclaimed wood that he had salvaged from frog’s recent office renovation and move. The students were to make these into seats, and as they began to play with these remnants of carpet, I was amazed to see that they not only saw the potentials but also how to use them. They began to achieve an understanding of what those things could be and how they could transform from flat to single and double curves just by pinning down certain parts of the sheet and by letting other parts of the sheet interpolate between those points. Anyone who’s ever modeled digitally knows the importance of splines and nurbs, but to the students, they were just letting the dumb material inform the way they were working.
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