Let’s start with your introduction to landscape, architectural, or interior design. Professional university design programs so often adhere to the old adage that, like medicine, for something to be good for you it has to taste bad? I am not alone when I talk about my anxiety-ridden first semesters in landscape architecture. The feelings of angst, anxiety, and self-doubt came with a sudden immersion into something very important and yet very new. Something I really wanted, and yet seemingly alien. And out of reach. Looking back, I came to realize my discomfort was an outgrowth of a sudden introduction to design jargon, ambiguous wording and directions, and an unintended impression design problem solving was a totally new thing. Years later I realized design and design problem solving wasn’t new to me, my classmates, and eventually my students. Our way of thinking and doing design was being expressed differently than we’d ever heard. But that was never made apparent. Learning design can be fun, it can be comfortable and exciting. What we experienced was a gatekeeper, today we’d probably call it a filter, much like accreditation, graduation, and licensure. Each is approached as a hurdle. They are, but if that first phase is more comfortable and fun, if it provides a way to express design as mutually understood by other designers and, oh my God, the greater public, the other hurdles leading to professional practice aren’t quite as high.
