I just heard a reference to Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and it reminded me of some issues I'd been thinking about. (Although, I suspect, not thinking about hard enough.) Feynman's point was real and straightforward--it was a call to look at what later became "nanotechnology"--but the title made me think about the bottom and smallness a bit more metaphorically.
I read a lot of commentary about designers and design education needing to deal with the big problems. I'm not objecting to that (except to the implication that the smaller problems of the world are somehow not worthy of our attention.) I do wonder about how one learns to design massive political or economic systems.
In my tiny corner of design and design education, failure is important. Design gets taught and learned by trying things and failing. For that matter, much of design gets done by trying things, making them real fast enough to detect failure, and moving on to non-failing (or less failing) possibilities.
I won't try to make this into a more specific or coherent question. Comments?
Gunnar
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Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
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