One of the most significant challenges I have faced, and continue to face, in a heavily design oriented graduate school program is being able to distill my reviews down to what I believe is valuable feedback. There is so much work to be completed and so little time to have it evaluated, that the brief time I do get in front of an audience, who have a wide range of knowledge of the assignment and goals I was aiming to achieve, often leaves me frustrated (see previous post). I know that the review/critique process has value. If you can’t explain your design process and proposal to someone and be able to hear what they think, and in turn want, how will you ever survive in a client oriented industry with something as indefinable as successful landscape design? That’s one reason why I believe the review process has instructional merit. The other is that assignments and objectives truly never seem clearer to me than the instant a group of people start having synergy about what they think were the strengths and “missed opportunities” in my proposals. However, with that fleeting bit of clarity comes a fair dose of opinion that is little more than an explanation of individual taste, as opposed to an offering about the universal truths of design process, presentation and theory. The problem is that opinion (taste) and suggestions on honing ones design technique are talked about in the exact same manner, same sentence and are sometimes confused with one another as being instructional.

Another problem is that reviewers, who I think generally air on the side of negativity for the safety it affords, often bring their own failures or successes with them to the table. More often than not, something I have created reminds them of something they like or dislike rather than being a proposal of something completely new and autonomous. This makes it difficult for me to see past who they are as designers to who I am as one. If we can’t all design towards the same right answer because we are all inhernetly different in nature and there is no right answer, then what exactly am I hoping to get out of these peoples comments? I know it’s in there somewhere, but I need a better grasp on it.

My intention here is not to make a sweeping judgement on the state of the review process, but to try to summarize the difficulties I’m experiencing with it. What can I do to further gain from this practice that is so heavily integrated into my curriculum and counts towards my evaluation?

So, this experiment may have trouble getting off the ground, but I would like to open a quick discussion to my classmates (you can reply here or post something on your own blog) as to what single piece of information offered or idea born was most valuable to you in the last review. Preferebly it’s not a direct quote from one of the faculty sitting in or something taken from the project evaluation, but just a comment on what glaring opportunity you think you missed, what purpose you will bring with you to the next project or how you think you have evolved as a designer in the last few weeks.

I’ll start with my own:

I wish I would have had one single diagram from beginning to finish that adapted to my preference for more geometrical forms and I wish I could have preempted some comments on how I ended up doing this or that unfortunate thing with major program elements by explaining how I actually meant to do them because they made sense for reasons x, y and z (and of course in my opinion, were in great taste).