What Could You Create In A Weekend?
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Sprint qualifier—Image credit: Dave Haygarth
Yesterday’s zesty comments on brainstorming have encouraged me to continue reminiscing about my design school days. Anything I still remember after 15-20 years is worth massaging into something we can all use now.
What stands out for me today is the Virginia Society’s weekend charette. As I Remember It (AIRI), the annual event was always exciting, thrilling, exhausting, and disappointing. That last was my nature at the time (unfortunately), and the first three were the nature of the game.
The design guidelines and merciless countdown would have hundreds of students cranking out work all weekend—some without any sleep—and I’m still amazed at what we could produce in 63 hours. Looking back on it, what may be useful to us now is how I learned to manage the task, the ways we executed our solutions, and the competitive community spirit at its best. Read more
What’s 10% Of Nothing?
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252 of 2,601 squares—Image credit: striatic
The Backstory
Back in 1987—before CDs, iPods, the Internet, and eBay—I was a first year student in Virginia Tech’s architecture program. The program’s first phase was the Foundation, where they stret-t-t-t-t-tched our mind with design possibilities. And my first professor, Gene Egger, was max fabulous at making design possibilities happen.
The man wouldn’t let us use color for three months—he said we had earn it. No fasteners or glue for model building, either. From Labor Day to Thanksgiving, our world was pencil and black pens, white poster board, white paper, and clever assembly.
And so he kept us focused on the fundamentals of making things—not making things pretty—and we learned to handle materials the way they wanted to be handled. His offbeat rules had an amazing way of teaching us things we didn’t appreciate until much later.
Oddly enough, his lessons have helped me throughout my many detours, like developing websites and building databases. But the best of Egger’s lessons might be the most widely applicable: his 10% rule. Read more
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