Bonnie Cook – Design Musings

Exploration A, Part 2 was a learning experience for me. For whatever reason, right out of the gate once the time began counting down, I felt like the instructions said for me to take the list of words provided and to make a concept map out of them. About 16 minutes in I had everything where I wanted it and was ready to submit when I realized I had read the exercise instructions wrong. I was supposed to take word 1 from my list! Since the time was nearly up, I went ahead and submitted the concept I had come up with. Embarrassed, I sent our professor an updated concept map of my first list of words. I then proceeded to submit concept maps for my words for the next two playground exercises. It wasn’t until the timer wasn’t running anymore that I was able to read that I had only needed to submit lists of words… not maps. I sighed a deep sigh and just let it go. Lesson learned here was that no matter my age, i’m still terrified of timed tests/exercises and take them too seriously. When I took the GRE for the first time, I accidentally erased my entire test at the very end because I was clicking through too fast and didn’t see that the button I hit last was “cancel my test.” Somehow lamenting my mess up on the playgrounds says a lot about my approach to those types of exercises. If anything, it was leaving the playground exercises and thinking about it later that allowed me to realize that I “go too fast” whether under pressure or not and that the entire concept of playground can teach me to think slow and purposefully, even if there is a timer running behind me.

Thankfully the third part of this exploration has been much less stressful for me. I received Noor’s list of words and have been jotting words that I think of as I walk by the list and muse over which ones haven’t been listed already. For me, what has been interesting is the odd, obscure meanings of words that we do not think of initially (those 20 minutes) and note. One of Noor’s words was “culture” and beyond the people/place/tradition definition of culture, it can also mean tissue or bacteria culture. With time (or at least making the time to spend with a concept) meanings can be discovered and explored through design. It was hard to get beyond the initial list of words as for the first 5 minutes I kept thinking up words that were already on the list. Finally, though, I branched out. Tonight i’m finishing up my additions to the word list – no rushing!