 My name is Mitch Goldstein and I am an assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York. And you can find my various Mitchisms sort of on the Internet at designcrit.com and on Twitter, like everybody else. And one other thing I wanted to mention specifically to you guys today was that I have started co-hosting a podcast called Through Process. And we're really talking a lot about design education, design pedagogy, and really kind of how we teach and things like that. So you might find that sort of fairly interesting, we've got about a dozen episodes up by now. So today I'm going to talk to you about delightful confusion. And this is a way that I think we can approach teaching design by embracing instead of avoiding confusion. And I'm going to kind of explain this idea. And then I'm going to show you some work that really shows you how it can be applied. So many of you in this room have spent about 20 years in school, some less, some more. But in the United States at least, we start when we're about four or five years old. Elementary school, junior high school, high school, eventually we go on to college. Those of us who have an MFA, we do another two or three years. So that 20 years of education is very well-structured. It's very goal-oriented. It's always looking forward to kind of finishing what you're doing now and then on to the next thing. And when we use education as a means to an end, you get educated and then you can get a job. And there's a level of predictability to that. And I think that in today's economy, getting a job is great. I'm not faulting anybody for that. I think that it's a very noble and it's a very worthy goal of education. But I think as designers we want maybe more than just a job. So therefore I think that this kind of structure, it presents a really big issue once we actually get into college. And specifically when we look at art and design education. And I think that issue is this. Students have been taught to expect clear goals with somewhat predictable outcomes. And they're basically taught to know kind of what's next. And this doesn't really change when you get into design school. Students want to learn how to get to the end and re-reward this idea in how we structure design education. We talk in terms of final grades, final projects, senior capstone, thesis, senior shows, all that stuff. And we teach students the rules. And we teach students the tools. And then we teach them kind of how to iterate based on sort of how we iterated. And really the thrust of most design education seems to be driving students to the realization that making this finished thing is kind of where it ends. Now we're all kind of getting to the finish line. And I really think we should consider a different idea as educators. Something that is equally important to getting things done, and that is not getting things done. Not driving to the finish, but driving to the inquiry. Teaching students how to ask instead of just how to answer. And I think to do this, we need to have a stronger consideration for what the students are doing before they actually get to the end. And to think about teaching and critiquing not just in the context of the final outcome, but in the context of now. In the context of what the student is doing at this current moment. I think we need to stop worrying so much about whether the direction they are heading in might be good or bad. Or if like a tangent is right or wrong. But I think students need to appreciate the work they are doing today. Not just as a step to the final in a month or two. And we tend to dismiss interesting tangents and distractions because we keep driving towards the end. I think that the tangents, the distractions, I think these things are extremely valuable. And Grace Paley was an American writer who wrote this essay called The Value of Not Understanding Everything. Which is just like wonderful. And she talked about how the common advice that you give to writers is to write about what you know. But then she argues really for the exact opposite. She thinks that writers should not write about what they know, but about what they don't know. Specifically because that will lead them to learn more. They will come to something with fewer preconceptions, fewer expectations with a fresh perspective. Which means writers and designers should spend more time being confused about what they're working on. Because that allows the outcomes to be unpredictable. And the discoveries have yet to be discovered. So I think with this knowledge and information we acquire, one of the most useful things to learn is learning what you don't know. I think that you should learn to be confused. And that you should learn to know that you don't know more than you do know. Because confusion opens us up to making wrong decisions. And it allows for more opportunities to make interesting mistakes. And when we delight in confusion, we can move to new ideas. We can revel in new methods, new ways of creating meaning in our work. Instead of just iterating again kind of in a way we've been taught. And this is a thing. Just scary, right? That is not me photoshopping, that is a thing. So it feels like an awful lot of design education is about trying to remove confusion, right? This is how you use the tools, this is how you use type, this is a baseline grid, all that stuff. This is the right way to do X or the right way to do Y. I think there's an important place where we need to embrace and encourage confusion to be able to allow students to discover new things. And that means allowing students to be confused. So I have just an example of this. This is a poster by Nancy Scolos and Tom Waddell, which honors Matthew Carter for the AIGA award a little while back. And Tom tells this great story about how they had been given the poster assignment, they'd been given the project, but they really didn't have any ideas. And they were kind of like walking through a hardware store one day. And Tom kind of turned a corner and saw this display of magnifying glasses in a stand. And through it he saw the text. And guess what, there was the poster. Like it was pretty much waiting for him in that discovery. They were not looking for the magnifying glasses. They did not go to the hardware store thinking how we're gonna do this Matthew Carter poster. They just happened to look, they happened to discover it. And they all kind of allowed the poster to be discovered. We need to really synthesize the clear with the confusing. I think that students need to learn about working with confusion as much as they need to learn about working with grids. Confusion is not something we should try to minimize. It should be something we should exploit. We should teach confusion to live with understanding and clarity. They should be roommates, not bitter enemies. I believe that when students do the kind of work that I'm gonna talk to you about today, alongside more traditional design education ideas, it will give them a much rounder, a much fuller, and a much more open idea of how they can relate to design. So I wanna show you some examples of this in and out of the classroom. This is not just theory. This is an applied way that we can kind of think about approaching how we teach. And this is the film, The Five Obstructions, which I'm not gonna show right now. But this is a Danish film. If you have not seen it, I strongly, strongly recommend you do see it. And in the film, the director Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, this guy named Jorgen Leth, to remake one of Jorgen Leth's short films five times. And each time von Trier, kind of being a little bit of a jerk, gives Leth these ridiculous obstructions, these crazy parameters he has to work with. And I really use this film a lot, because I think it's a great way to teach kind of a framework of confusion. I use it in a lot of different assignments in a lot of different ways. Because it forces students to confront confusion and to learn to deal with it. They have no option but to be confused and to not know where the work is going. So I have variations on how I use this idea. But students either choose content or are given content. They then pick three limitations literally like out of a Ziploc bag on a piece of paper, which is a really fun hour. Everybody gets irritated, it's great. They pick a formal limitation, a methodological limitation, a conceptual limitation. And then we really work with the content in any way they see fit. So some examples of this. This student had to work with recursion and 101 layers. And she made a series of prints by remaking and reusing each print into the print that came after it. And she originally started with a project she did about geology when she was like a sophomore. And these kind of just evolved into a series of covers for a bunch of essays that she was interested in. This student took a single photograph from a project she did about Dutch architecture and she worked in her limitations of cutting, making it happy, and using a light. So she cut up the photo, she painted on the photo, she cut it into strips, she wove them together, she kind of put them on a light table and shot them. And she ended up with this beautiful accordion book you can see on the bottom here that spelled out a sentence from a book that she was really interested in that she thought was appropriate. This next student had to work with random numbers, sculpture, and black and white. And he started with a foundation project that used ink and pen, ink and brush on water on paper. And he explored making sculptures out of the black and white forms and he ended up creating a zoetrope, which is like an old school animated thing that spins around, right? And he ended up using these photographs to make the typeface you can see in the lower right. So clearly these students had no clue where they were going with this. They could not know where they were going with this. They had to let the process just go with and let them do kind of what they were doing. So the next set of work is basically the same sort of assignment, but this is graduate students. And now these students are working in a framework specifically to create a poster, which was for a project about the future of cities, where cities were going to go in the future. So this student had to use Flickr. She had to use her opposite hand and she had to make it fun. So she started with, I was going to say I don't make up these rules, except I totally make up these rules, so never mind. She started with these abstract drawings with her wrong hand. And then she rendered these drawings on the computer using Rhino, using 3D software, posted them to Flickr and took photos. And then to make it fun, she used a kaleidoscope that she used to enjoy using when she was a little kid. So she sort of held the kaleidoscope up and shot these images with her phone. And she eventually got to this idea of the city in the cloud. So the poster became this really tangible like applied treatment of these ideas. Another student had to use a hundred mouse clicks, only circles, and he had to make it personal. So his rather clever take on using the limitations was to literally use the pieces of paper I wrote the limitations on. So if you see this guy looking for a job, just, you know, I'm just saying, pay attention. Whoops, skipped one there. So he set up his camera on his desktop and the camera was kind of pointing behind him at this window. The window had little kind of circles that kind of helped to screen the sunlight. And he set his camera on a timer to randomly take photos of himself as he worked. And he eventually got to this poster about online versus real identity and how we identify ourselves in the future of the city. And then this last student project I want to show, she had to work somewhere new. She had to make it stop motion and she had to make it laugh. So she started in her roommate's bedroom as she described laughing her ass off while stringing yarn around a stool, you know. And then she experimented taking photos of these strings kind of moving around the stool and stopping the motion, the photos. And this led to some really gorgeous images that reminded her of like network diagrams and connectivity. She added in some vector shapes. And eventually she got to this idea about like the new global neighborhood. So next I want to talk about using this kind of framework outside of the classroom into client work, into applied work. And this is client work that my partner Ann Jordan did recently. And this is the cover design for a book called Convulsing Bodies, which is a book about the philosopher Michelle Foucault and his thoughts on the human body and religion. And so I'm going to show you a whole bunch of options that Ann went through to kind of get to the final piece. And Ann designs a lot using cameras, lots of exploration with like scanners and cameras and things like that, tons of different materials like papers and inks and brushes. And her process, it's really not about I want it to look like this. The process is what could this look like? And she goes from there. And she uses the design process to discover form and meaning. This means that there's a lot of confusion and a lot of inquiry in the work because it is not heading towards a predictable place. But instead it goes in lots and lots of different directions that are very, very roughly grouped conceptually. So ultimately for one cover she will create hundreds of different compositions, almost all of which will not be used. In fact, all except one will not be used. But that eventually lead to the final cover that you see here. And what I've learned working with Ann is that nothing is garbage. All of these ideas that she generated, it's not kind of for waste because she kind of puts them away, she keeps them, puts them into her drawer. Sometimes literally puts them into a drawer. And it likely percolates up later. It becomes other things down the road. So then I want to show a project that I did. And this is a project that promotes a class I taught about music video. And it uses the same ideas of confusion and discovery in the process to kind of lead me along here. So first I looked at some unused work that I had not really touched many months before. These happened to be photographs of a music video playing on my computer. These really kind of pixely grainy images that I actually really liked. And then I created a quick little animation in After Effects with an image or two, some of the main information typeset. The whole thing is at 90 degrees because I knew this was going to go vertical down the road. And I looped this movie. And I projected it onto some big sheets of paper. I was waving around in front of a digital projector. And I then shot those projections with a long exposure on a still camera. And what this did was it generated a lot of still images, most of which did not work at all. But I was kind of seeing where the process was leading me. Eventually some of the compositions started working. And I ended up with hundreds of almost posters, hundreds of things that were kind of going somewhere but weren't there yet. But eventually I found the final poster. It was as a result of discovery. So in my head I had an initial very broad idea of where I was going. And then I worked through the process to see what came of it. And I spent 99% of this project being confused out of my mind and not knowing where stuff was going to go. But I kind of trusted the confusion. And it eventually led me somewhere good. So to kind of come back full circle to school, I think that those applied projects I just showed are synthesizing the confusion and the discoveries alongside type, image, form, all the things we learned in school. But I've also taken this idea of inquiry and discovery to its kind of most extreme conclusion, which is simply making. Making with no assignment, making with no brief, no form, no content, no direction, no nothing. Again, my partner Ann and I, we spent about a half hour a day doing what we call an inside walk. And we just make to make. We discover what happens along the way. And then we post the results online at this website that you guys can take a look at. And this is really about us kind of going back to the classroom. So I'm just going to show you, we've got hundreds and hundreds of things up there. This is just a few examples. We change tools and materials on a whim. Sometimes we do the same thing for a few days. Sometimes we do it once and never touch it again. But the goal is to encourage confusion and to learn the habit of making. And really, this is kind of like walking the talk, basically, that I talked to my students about. I'm now kind of doing it myself. And it's resulted in what we feel is some really great stuff. And it's also resulted in some what we feel is absolute garbage as well. But that's kind of how it works. That's part of the game that we're playing here. So we make the work, we post it, we document it. It's all online in this visual archive. We can kind of look at and see where it goes. Any originals we make, any physical pieces, which is 95% of it is physical, goes into a drawer somewhere. And working this way really sparks new ideas, new methodologies, new ways of making form and meaning. And it infuses itself into our other work. It infuses it into our client work. It very much infuses into how I teach about process and methodology in my classes. And it's 30 minutes a day that pretty much always starts with confusion and sometimes irritation and annoyance. But from that confusion, all of these really interesting things kind of happen. And again, the work is online. Feel free to take a peek if you like. It's updated very regularly, usually a few times a week. So in conclusion, I think a very important part of what we should be teaching students is to have a sense of self in their work. The students should develop a voice and a vision as creators. And I think that delightful confusion is a way to encourage that. Because students need to understand that design is about inquiry. And they also understand that part of what they are learning in school is how to ask. And then apply those questions to their work. Thank you very much.