A Beginners Mind

PROCEEDINGS
21st National Conference
on the Beginning Design Student

Stephen Temple, editor

Conference held at the

College of Architecture
The University of Texas at San Antonio
24-26 February 2005

A Beginners Mind
PROCEEDINGS
21st National Conference
on the Beginning Design Student
Stephen Temple, editor
College of Architecture
The University of Texas at San Antonio
24-26 February 2005

Situating Beginnings
Questioning Representation
Alternative Educations
Abstractions and Conceptions
Developing Beginnings
Pedagogical Constructions
Primary Contexts
Informing Beginnings
Educational Pedagogies
Analog / Digital Beginnings
Curriculum and Continuity
Interdisciplinary Curricula
Beginnings
Design / Build
Cultural Pluralities
Contentions
Revisions
Projections

Offered through the Research Office for Novice Design

Education, LSU, College of Art and Design, School of
Architecture.
Copyright 2006 University of Texas San Antonio
/ individual articles produced and edited by the authors

Printed proceedings produced by Stephen Temple, Associate Professor, University of Texas San Antonio.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without
written permission of the publisher.
Published by:
University of Texas San Antonio
College of Architecture
501 West Durango Blvd.
San Antonio TX 78207
210 458-3010
fax 210 458-3016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Temple, Stephen, editor
A Beginners Mind: Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on the Beginning Design Student /
edited and compiled by Stephen Temple
1. Architecture - Teaching 2. Architecture - Design 3. Design - Teaching

ISBN 0-615-13123-9

PRETTY UGLY
GREG WATSON
School of Architecture and Design
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
INTRODUCTION
This oxymoron, while perhaps a little cute, nonetheless describes the primary criteria that
many beginning students use to judge their work. Their evaluation operates along a continuum;
with these terms acting as the poles, and its clear to them which pole is better. Whats important
about these criteria is that they are reflections of a static set of preconceptions about what
constitutes good and bad things; linked suggestively to familiarity and notions of taste and style.
There are other subsets of this dichotomy that include the discrimination between ideas that work
versus those that dont work, things that are wanted versus those that are not wanted and, most
basically, things that are right versus things that are wrong. On the surface it appears theres not
much more to it. These judgments are expressed, primarily verbally, in an un-shaded way. They
seem to be made with a certainty, a clarity, about the work that is often emphatically stated when
asked to discuss it. These narratives create a fiction of control that the student attempts to project
when discussing their work.
It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one
and the same source; for that reason one must often not do
something to the detriment of error since one would do also
something detrimental to truth.(1)
These traits are really not all that surprising. Most of us arrive at design school having
been well conditioned by education that places a high value on problem solving skills, linear
reasoning, reductive analytical techniques and, perhaps most importantly, predictable outcomes.
The fewer mistakes you make the smarter you appear. The consequence is that many come to
the subject of design strongly averse to error and motivated to work very carefully to avoid it,
either in fact or in appearance. Error is failure and failure is feared. We hate being wrong. This of
course is not just an affliction affecting the novice, but it is particularly resistant in the beginner,
and in architecture we can be beginners for quite some time.
The friction between these skills and their consequences and the skills needed in design studio is
considerable. Its between two ways of working and thinking. One method is structured to avoid
error and reduce the risk of failure versus another that ideally, according to the premise of this
paper, invites risk and deals creatively with the ambiguity and uncertainty of designing anything.
One is focused on structured problem solving with the other grounded in repeated practice and
the certain expectation of error. Its this friction that stimulates the cautiousness and fear that
influences so much of the work and thinking of beginning designers. The dilemma for the student
and the teacher is that this fear is attenuated by nurturing a number of strong visual and cognitive
habits. (2)

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CERTAINTY
One of the reasons this is a dilemma for the instructor is that we ourselves are
susceptible to fears of failure and error and respond in surprisingly similar ways to the students. It
is known what is wanted, and how that information is to be communicated. It seems evident from
experience and observation that a great deal of the work done in beginning design studios is
structured to help the students avoid making ugly things. When they appear, as they inevitably
will, they are often vigorously and quickly suppressed. This suppression takes many forms from
active and direct correction to humiliation to starvation by inattention. Other methods of avoiding
confrontations with the potential disasters lurking in beginners work involves projects built around
highly prescriptive and constrained instructions that clearly outline and define the steps of the
process and the end product. It is easier and less risky, for both the instructor and the student, to
be directed to the conclusion than left to discover and decide on a conclusion. These types of
instructions are rarely accompanied by an equally clear or comprehensive explanation of the
intentions of the assignment. That would introduce another, less controllable variable. Its
interesting to consider how methods of instruction can reinforce and exploit, either consciously or
unconsciously, the students fears and their defensive assumptions about what is right or wrong,
good or bad, pretty or ugly. This is done not by revealing them, confronting them, or dismantling
them, but like a virus, replacing, reshaping and refining their contents and rules, and redesigning
their outcomes.

Fig 1 Controlled outcomes

In 1984, James Fitzggibon wrote a critical essay on how certain styles of instruction work to
directly, or indirectly, imposes a normative set of standards on design studios. They work both to
the benefit of the instructor and the student. The standards, introduced through the methods
described above, worked to create conformity in the process, the product and the vocabulary of
the design studio.
Looking at representative samplings of student design work it is not difficult to
decide that a large majority of architectural students (to say all students would of
course be going a bit too far) but in numbers high on an asymptotic curve,
approaching totality, that these students all appear to design buildings in exactly
the same way. There is a pervasive, almost cloned, similarity apparent in the
design work and in the design procedures that students employ in just about

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every American architectural school. The buildings look the same, the graphic
techniques look the same, the explanations offered are the same and the
specialized language that surfaces during critical discussions is as though taperecorded from a central architectural concordance. In all respects a remarkable
sameness prevails...(3)
While Fitzgibbon was referencing the work being produced across the studio curriculum, he also
addresses specifically the issue of basic design teaching.
The problem, of course, is as we have seen, that architectural studios under
Method operation, work to perfection even with students quite unprepared in any
real design or architectural sense. Success seems to require only the wit and the
energy necessary for following the Method steps.(4)
Twenty years later, the situation seems virtually unchanged. The type of work that
Fitzgibbon described is still present because the underlying motives remain unchanged. Much of
current studio work is still generated and sustained by methods teaching and styles of learning
that actively suppress the awkward, the uncertain, the ambiguous or the ugly. Attention is focused
on looking for examples that match the rules with little time devoted to the study of the work that
fails to meet the standards. This model of evaluation makes the comparison of work, and the
arguments supporting it, internally consistent: Does it follow the instructions? Yes = correct, No =
incorrect. Does it appear consistent with instructors expectations? Yes = good (pretty), No = bad
(ugly). Does it meet the students expectations for their work? Unknown-N/A. The resulting range
of work is extraordinarily tight, falling very close to the mean. Students whose efforts fall away
from the mean quickly learn to adjust their work and conform to the rules, techniques and habits
of the studio; to move toward the pretty and away from the ugly.
RISK
These types of methods run contrary to what we understand about the nature of any
creative act. Its not plausible that 40 students, at any level, over a short period of time, would
start drawing the same conclusions about what constitutes good or bad work unless guided by
some authoritative instruction which shapes and enforces a consensus. Consensus supports
rules and rules control risk. Experience should make it clear, however, that designing anything
involves risk. Removing the risk from design work leaves little to learn but technique. The
possibility of failure must remain close to the work. The presence of risk and the possibility of
failure, if allowed, is part of what draws and sustains our attention, once we understand the
importance and value of both.
David Pye, in his book The Nature of Art and Workmanship, puts forward an idea about
the role of risk in the creative process that supports these notions. He divides creative work into
two general categories or types: the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty.
in principle the distinction between the two different kinds of workmanship is
clear and turns on the question: Is the result predetermined and unalterable
once production begins? (5)
This distinction, as described by Pye, goes on to articulate the consequences for work that is
structured to increase certainty compared to work that engages risk. In general, his position is
that regardless of ones level of skill, creative work that does not involve, in a genuine way, the
risk of failure is rarely work of consequence or persistence. The simple fact is that failure is
instructive. It is elemental to learning. When, in Pyes model, work ceases to engage risk and the

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possibility of failure, it becomes more an act of manufacturing that an act of art. The certainty of
its outcome increases while the possibility of error and failure decrease. As instructive work, it is
spent.

FIG 2. Safe work

Its important to note that this idea of work and risk says nothing about the quality or beauty of
things made by the workmanship of risk versus the workmanship of certainty. On the contrary,
things made with certainty can be of extraordinary quality while things made by the workmanship
of risk often fail. Taking risks with ones work is not a guaranty of beauty or high quality. Its value
is in increasing the range of possibilities in ones work and the probability that these things will
emerge in the process and its products.
The workmanship of the standard bolt or nut, or a glass or polyethylene
bottle, a tobacco tin or an electric light bulb, is as good as it could
possibly be. The workmanship of risk has no exclusive prerogative of
quality. What it has exclusively is an immensely various range of
qualities, without which at its command the art of design becomes arid
and impoverished. (6)
What makes this idea of risk and failure pertinent to beginning design education is that it
presents a direct challenge to the defensive reflexes and habits that students and instructors
engage in. It argues for a way of working that supports fearlessness and recognizes not just the
inevitability of failure, but also its value as a generative and instructive moment. It discredits the
nave criteria based on superficial qualities of appearance and the correlation of work to set of
arbitrary instructions or rules. By relieving the beginning student from the tyranny of making
pretty things, it provides an opportunity to develop in the novice an appreciation for a more
exploratory and probative approach to design. Its from a foundation in which the student takes
responsibility for the decisions they make, and where those decisions lead their work that will
come the positions and principles that will shape their future work.

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Fig 3. Inert
Anyone who has taught drawing or studio to beginning students knows how tough it can
be to walk into a room full of naive, incomplete, misunderstood, awkward, ugly, horrible things.
The panic that this creates in beginning faculty teaching beginning students is almost an olfactory
event. You can smell the fear on both sides. The instructor wonders if anyone else has seen this.
Should it be hidden? Will it effect my evaluation? Was I this bad? What follows is often a fateful
decision to make certain this doesnt happen again. The students also dont want it to happen
again, and so the instruction begins. Imagine the violin teacher yanking the instrument out of the
students hands to play the lesson as it should be played.

Fig. 4 Impoverished
The fallacy, of course is the belief that there is some way to short circuit or expedite this
uncomfortable stage of development. The fact is that this is the inherent nature of beginning
anything. There is no way to avoid this part of the process. It begs the question why would you
want to? It is at this moment that students have the opportunity to examine the static state of their
understanding of design. It is the time to reveal to themselves and others the nature of the
preconception they bring with them. It is a time to explore the limits of their skills of observation,
drawing, making, and thinking. It is an emersion into what we all understand to be an ambiguous
and uncertain endeavor, and their first trials in learning how to navigate this territory. It needs to
be the time when they are encouraged to make their most disastrous mistakes as opposed to

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learning how to achieve small, timid, technical successes. It should be a time of exuberance and
fearlessness. Like the violin lessons, it is also a time for patience and practice on both sides.
References
1. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Art and Antiquity, III, 1 (1821)
2. Greg Watson, Visual Habit (Design Communications Association Proceedings, 2004).
3. James Fitzgibbon, How Architecture Students Design (Unpublished essay, Washington University, 1984).
4. ibid.
5. David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge University Press, 1968).
6. ibid
Fig 1.
Fig.2
Fig 3
Fig 4

Second year architectural design

Second year interior design
Second year architectural design
Second year architectural design

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