Yesterday I went out to the Rural Studio to meet with Andrew Freear to talk about all kinds of beginning semester stuff. In amongst the wide-ranging conversation we started to talk about where ideas come from, and how the Rural Studio manages to get work done. For me the thing that I am always taken with in the process of design deals with the “art of the possible,” or rather focusing our energies on what we can do, instead of what we can’t. I think on campus we often get caught doing the latter – somehow confusing our pithy and salient observations concerning all the difficulties of the problem at hand with actually doing work. Ultimately it is a dodge – not because we are lazy, but rather because we think too often that design is simply a “convergent activity.” In other words, we tend to want to quickly isolate the issues of a problem and converge on a solution. At the Rural Studio, design is more often treated as a divergent activity: one in which you first must ask what is desirable, and only then ask what is possible. Thinking about what is possible versus what is impossible may sound like only a subtle distinction, but in my experience it is the difference between a successful brainstorming session and an unsuccessful one. My good friend Adam Kallish calls this the difference between “problem seeking” and “problem solving.” I like to think of it simply as developing goals versus implementing solutions. All this reminded me of a series of fantastic original illustrations produced  by Scott Campbell for Showoff Films.

Eight Ways to Kill an Idea

By: Scott Campbell