The Art of Trial and Error

Ontario Extend: Activity 1 Identify a concept that is often misunderstood in your discipline. Can you think of an analogy that can help make the concept make sense to students?

Photo by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash

Student: I've tried everything, and nothing is working.

I'm in my fifth year of teaching within the Graphic Design program, and this is still the song played by so many students across all three years within the program — no matter how much feedback I provide, or suggestions on how to improve, or helping them move to a new concept and let go of the old one, some of them still struggle to grab hold of an idea, and work with it. The timeframe in which this frustration-level is reached seems to shorten every year; they want to generate an original, unconventional, unpredictable concept within the first 30 minutes of settling into the project, otherwise, it's considered a bust, and interest is lost. While I don't hold statistical information on this fact, the observed (and personally experienced) reality is that the first few concepts a student generates has likely been generated by everyone else in the room. Innovative, insightful, and meaningful results are often the product of many revisions, trial and error...upon error, feedback from client (prof and peers in this case), more revisions, with the added learned-tools of patience and persistence. The analogy that often lends well in comparison is the art of cooking and perfecting a recipe. While there may be a genetic predisposition to enjoying the act of cooking and concocting interesting meals, no one knows right off the bat what ingredients will blend well together. It takes research, repetition, recording the details of successful meals versus unpalatable ones, and actively cooking on a regular basis to understand what connections and pairings are valuable, and then dedicating them to memory so that you can build upon the flavour palette later. I was a fairly mediocre and uninspired cook without much interest in the act while living alone, until my current partner encouraged me to cook with him, and constantly test the food to make sure it was seasoned to taste. I encourage my students in a similar fashion, to "try out" their designs on their peers, friends, family, and other faculty to see if their concept is clear, clever, creative...and palatable. If not, then either switch up the ingredients or try a new recipe — there are often multiple solutions to a problem in the design world...it's just a matter of generating or finding the best one.

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