I finished Design Camp a week ago—it was an amazing experience! I co-taught with Gary Dickson and Ryan Gottfried as TA. (Here is an article featuring a photo of our students’ graphic design work.)
I had already known that I loved teaching, but this really confirmed it. The students were so talented and did some amazing work that I was really proud of. They were so willing to learn and to work hard.
What probably made the biggest impact on me, after having sat for so many years in the students’ seats and now having the tables turned, was how clearly I could see the value in the “leap of faith” step in creative work. Each student had a day to complete their project (we had a total of 80 students over the course of the week, 16 of them at a time), so that part of the process was necessary for all of them, if only for time’s sake. I saw a number of them who tended toward the same hesitant and perfectionist tendencies as I do, and had to encourage them to lay their concerns aside and just make. There would be little value in spending all their time searching magazine pages for the “perfect” element for a collage (perhaps the equivalent of searching endless pages of the internet for the perfect idea?). Gary and I had done the project ourselves with the same time constraints, so we knew how much there was to do in so little time. I remembered that feeling of having to jump in feet first (rapid prototype style), just following your gut and seeing where your tiny seed of an idea could take you. I told some of the kids that it was like Alice in Wonderland—you had to just follow that white rabbit down the hole and see where it led. There was literally no time to sit and ponder the “rabbit” and speculate about where the “hole” went to. I had to take this approach for my version of the project, and the students would have to also.
I’m really glad now for being able to experience that alternate perspective. To know, very intimately from my own experiences, the anxiety the students felt, but being able to see beyond it and lead the students past it. Part of the joy in that was from the outcome, that so many of them did excellent work as a result of being pushed, but for me it had even more meaningful implications for my own design work. I can see a little more clearly the faults and time-wasting practices in my own process. And now I have an idea of what’s needed to push through my own fears and hesitancies toward making better work. Just follow that little white rabbit… take that leap of faith, plant that tiny mustard seed… and see what happens. 90% of the time it will be something really good.
