Title: Playing in the Sandbox: The Role of Experimentation in Designing
Context: This is one of my favorite posts that I’ve read in a long time. Please, please, please find a few minutes to read. It explains my work philosophy quite well.
Synopsis: If you aren’t finding time in your day to day work life to experiment then you aren’t really a designer. I will not argue about this.
Best Bit: “Many times, experimentation leads to failure or a discovery of limitations and impossibilities—this is still valuable. As I tell my students, utter failure arises from half-hearted, undisciplined attempts that lead nowhere. Beautiful failure, on the other hand, is a disciplined, committed attempt that may fail in delivering the intended results, but leads to discovery, knowledge, and encourages reflection.”
Bounus quote: “The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.” -Chuck Close
via uxmag.com
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