… from Architecture School.
Here’s a valuable quote from that book:
Process:
Being process-oriented, not product-driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop.
Being process-oriented means:
1. seeking to understand a design problem before chasing after solutions;
2. not force-fitting solutions to old problems onto new problems;
3. removing yourself from prideful investment is your projects and being slow to fall in love with your ideas;
4. making design investigations and decision holistically (that address several aspects of a design problem at once) rather than sequentially (that finalize one aspect of a solution before investigating the next);
5. making design decisions conditionally — that is, with the awareness that they may or may not work out as you continue toward a final solution;
6. knowing when to change and when to stick with previous decisions;
7. accepting as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do;
8. working fluidly between concept-scale and detail-scale to see how each informs the other;
9. always asking “What if…?” regardless of how satisfied you are with your solution.
(Frederick, M (2007). 101 things I learned in architecture school. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.)
Thanks for Nathan W. for sharing this valuable insight. Spending time in Seattle with SFU’s IAT233 class a couple of weeks ago refreshed some of this in me. Hopefully putting it here will stimulate some process in you.
