Inside/Outside: From the Basics to the Practice of Design, Second Edition

A Way of Working

Some class assignments have taken me years to develop, and development continues. Anyone who has taught design knows that the same assignment given by two teachers will not yield the same educational experience for the students. This principle holds when a teacher gives the same assignment to different students. The cliche is correct: “You can’t step in the same river twice.”

If a design assignment is well conceived, you get as many different solutions as you have students, unless it is a strictly mechanical exercise. Former students, now teachers, assign some of the exercises I assigned to them. And, of course, some of my assignments grow from ideas my mentors passed to me. Thus are traditions sustained from generation to generation, ...