Fifty Pounds of Ideas

I wanted to follow up my first Design a Day post with a little more explanation about the approach and goals of the project. I think that is summed up perfectly in this excerpt from a great book by David Bayles and Ted Orland called Art and Fear .

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

So that’s it. Fifty pounds of ideas, one for each weekday for as long as I can swing it. I don’t promise that they’ll all be jewels, just that I’ll toss them on the scale at the end of the year and see how much they weigh.