It’s a wonderful thing when a teacher gets amazing students. Then it’s not so much teaching as letting ideas loose in the room and watching them fly around.

The big question that I had was how to move design exercises that I’d taught using traditional media to the FabLab machines and have the class still be about design and not about learning the machines. This was a tricky thought game for me because the software is obtrusive for those who haven’t been exposed to it, so there would be a double learning curve for the class, especially if someone doesn’t have a design background.

One of the most important exercises for iterative design I’d ever seen was from Will Reimann’s Intro to Design class at Harvard, for which I had the privilege to be a teaching assistant. Take a wine cork and ink. Dip the cork in the ink and stamp the page with it. What can you do with it? How many different kinds of marks can you make with the cork? You can stamp it to get a circle. If you stamp it multiple times between dippings, the color fades to lighter gray with each stamping. You can roll it, drag it, etc.. It’s a simple object. Explore the cork. Make a mess.

On successive iterations, take a section from the previous iteration and expand on the idea. Refine with each iteration until you have a finished idea on a page.

After explaining the idea, my job was to feed them paper. My students were very very quick. (Quicker than the Harvard students!) I was so impressed.

There was a very strange artifact to the Harvard class. Incoming freshmen did consistently better than students who had been at Harvard for any length of time. The people who had the hardest time with it were people who were fine arts majors in their senior year. Reimann and I had discussed this, and there were several reasons that we thought might cause it. Whatever it was, whether it had something to do with investment in a Harvard methodology or fear of losing what they’d come to rely on, there was something at Harvard that hurt a student’s ability to think iteratively, or learn a new way of generating art.

One by one, as my students got the idea, I had them move to the machines. The exercise: take a circle and make a pattern by copying and pasting the circle on the artboard. We used Inkscape, an open source vector drawing program.

I helped them make the circle if they needed it. But after that, it was just copying and pasting and the tool’s cumbersome nature disappears. The exercise I’d given them earlier informed their work, whether it was conscious or not. There were some really stunning results. Some people eventually broke out of the circle and daringly moved to ovals! Their work still held together because the units had such similarities. Their stuff was wonderful!

We cut everything out of cardboard on the lasercutter. I chose cardboard because it’s cheap and very very quick. Acrylic is pretty, but takes forever to cut. It didn’t matter because the gratification was in seeing their design cut out by the machine. What a blast!

What was even better was how excited some of them are to come back next week!