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In my masters, I took a few courses from design degrees.The assignment of the semester was to create a generative display in Cinder. I cobbled something together based on what I thought looked good.

A project partner took the task of retroactively assigning an "intention" to my result. "The lines meeting in the center symbolize a conversation between people...".

To my surprise, the examiner bought this and we ended up with a good grade. I feel like I learned a lot from this course.

I'm not saying that's what happened here, but if it did, we probably couldn't tell.




Doesn't sound like a good design teacher if they cared at all about intent, or even how long it took you.

I heard an anecdote from someone whose mom went to art school, about how she (the mom) would spend days and days painstakingly processing materials and meticulously conceptualizing and constructing pieces, and always felt sour when a party girl did nothing but get drunk/high for weeks and then just "poured paint on her tits" for her assignment, and got a better grade. But maybe pouring paint on her tits was actually more profound, even if unintentionally, than whatever her mom was up to. Effort, intent, is meaningless in creative practice.


The thing though is that neither the intent nor de post-hoc made up intent are relevant in the real world. Neither is he time/effort spend on needlessly elaborate processes. What matters is if the average user thinks it looks good or not.




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