• Designers ain’t got nothing on engineers when it comes to “agile.”
• People can always tell when you are trying to impress them.
• You can practice foaming milk for lattes with water and a little bit of dish soap.

But the most important thing I have learned, and am still learning, has to do with the difference between knowledge and experience.

Turns out, four months out, I’m still reeling from The SVA IxD Experience (that should be the name of a rock opera). All those team projects. All that thesis angst. All that worrying about the future compacted into two frenzied years. And all that freakin’ knowledge.

School gives you knowledge, that much is obvious. But if your school is SVA, it also tries to give you Real World Experience. All those design briefs and presentation skills and late-night hyper-managerial strategizing sessions (a.k.a. whining about how much work we have to do). Not to mention the endless stream of Tweetable design adages. It was all so convincingly experiential that I mistook it for actual experience.

Knowledge, turns out, is not the same thing as experience.

Knowledge is always filtered through the lens of whoever imparts it. No matter how rigorous the curriculum or careful the learner, the parts that don’t fit into a cohesive narrative tend to get conveniently left out. And that means knowledge rarely ends up being as subtle and nuanced as it should be. It paints with broad, bold strokes that are easy to commit to memory. And in the end, you’re looking at things through a telescope. Even if the focus is clear and sharp, you’re still thousands of miles away.

And then, when you actually do land on the moon, you realize it is nothing like what you’d imagined.

Take all the musings I had done for my thesis, for example. After all those books, lectures, workshops, symposia, and debates with teachers and classmates, I thought I had the product development process all figured out. It was simply a matter of having a steady vision, tempering that with empathy for your audience, and then releasing fast and early. Armed thusly to the teeth with wise sayings and useful rules-of-thumb, I launched into my new career as interaction designer at (probably) the world’s most meritocratic, engineering-driven software firm ever. And it was here that I learned that everything I know has an asterisk after it.

Having vision is important, but so is co-owning it with your team. Empathy as a word is nice but it can collide with business objectives and technical realities. And there are a thousand variations on “fast and early.” A company that runs on engineers can take that to an extreme, which has its own faults and merits. And even if you feel like things are going off kilter, they are actually right on track (or vice versa).

Day by day, week by week, I’m slowly getting used to life on the moon. I’m filling in the gaps of understanding with detailed first-hand sketches. Being a direct observer is a lot tougher than reading a book where everything make sense. There are plenty of contradictions and equally good options you can’t choose between. Sometimes there is a sore lack of reason. “Why do we do things this way?” “Because it’s how we’ve always done it, but also because we haven’t had the time, but also because of the nature of the product…” The right answer isn’t simple, and there are a million of them anyway.

Experience.

Of course, school was an experience, too. But it’s an experience of school, not of your actual career. Any university brochure that tells you otherwise is lying to you. It can do things to prepare you for things to come by filling your head with rough outlines. But then it’s up to you to fill in all the gory details, the vibrant hues, and the subtle shading.

Then, as soon as the ink dries, that experience ossifies into knowledge, and you start afresh with new experiences. Observe, zoom in, clarify, deepen. Like a gorgeously infinite fractal, the process never ends. There is no limit to the fidelity of experience.

Better make sure your inkpot is full.

In Cognitive Surplus, which I started reading finally, Clay Shirky discusses how media has evolved so radically in just a generation’s time. Media was once, by popular definition, communication done by professionals. This was largely because the ability to broadcast messages publicly was available only to those who owned the risky and expensive means of production—television stations, printing presses, radio stations and other mass distribution channels. This was only 30 years ago. Clay recounts a story in which he tries to convince his students at ITP that there was once a time when the average citizen did not really have a public voice. That if you had something to say out loud, there was literally no way to say it aside from holding a sign on a street corner. His students (who I assume were all around my age) had a hard time empathizing with this experience.

Now we have the Internet, and the world is a different place. (It is hard not to take it for granted, sometimes.) Now, you no longer have to be approved by the stamp of professionalism to put your message out in the public. Anybody that has the means of consumption (a computer and an ISP) also has the means of production. Anyone can hit “publish,” including one 39-year old cancer sufferer who decided to take his most personal final hours and share it with the world on Reddit.

I am floored.

I’m floored both emotionally by the courage of this man (and no, I don’t think it’s a hoax… how cynical can you get?) and intellectually at this amazing example of the power of networks. Within hours, not only has his message reached thousands, but he’s received a veritable outpouring of support from all over the world. A spontaneous group effort sprung up to create a global map of pictures and stories, to help the dying man fulfill his wish of a final “world tour.” Heartfelt discussions got started, centering around the delicate issues of death, fear and mortality. Stories both humorous and gut-wrenching were passed around. For the next 51 hours, the world will feel much smaller.

To me, there is no better example of why I am so intrigued by the Internet. For one, it is enabling new forms of human relationships, right before our eyes. I call them new because, when in the past course of human history has someone made 3000 friends in a few hours, Dunbar’s number be damned? And I daresay we are just getting started.

Or perhaps it isn’t so new after all. Clay Shirky suggests that whenever a behavior surprises us, we shouldn’t ask whether something new has come along, rather we should suspect that the impetus has existed all along but the right conditions haven’t. This would imply that we as human beings have always wanted to reach out indiscriminately to each other in times of need. That’s heartening.

Tomorrow, when Lucidending self-administers his fatal dose of medicine, I feel certain that he will have recouped some of the dignity and clarity he is looking for. I’m also thankful for his post on Reddit. It’s living proof that amazing things are about to happen.

In school, and this school in particular, we are fed a lot of knowledge—facts, tricks, insights and instructions on how to be a great interaction designer. Wisdom, by which I mean that sense of connecting with some universal truth (well, as universal as you can get in these postmodern times), comes in rarer spurts.

I miss wisdom. Perhaps this is the nature of graduate school, especially one that is so uniquely focused on professional practice. There is much less hand-holding; we are supposed to be fully-formed human beings now, intellectually, emotionally. But I miss the discussions from my undergraduate days, long meandering conversations with professors, mentors and dorm-mates about topics ranging from street activism to the benefits of bad ideas. They had no point really; they weren’t going to make us better at our jobs. Their only maybe-purpose was to tease at the possibility of wisdom-formation.

Sometimes, wisdom takes the form of advice. We sure get a lot of that these days, mostly in the form of design adages. “Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” That’s a good one; I forget who said it. But an adage is not wisdom. Wisdom has permanence and dimension; it stands up to examination from all angles and is adaptable to many forms. An adage is only a heuristic to wisdom.

I wonder if opportunities for wisdom can be built into life, no matter what kind of schooling situation you are in. After all, they say that life is the ultimate education. I’m sure it’s there. I just have to look harder.

I just spent this entire evening of 5 hours doing nothing but sifting through the Internets instead of getting things done. (There, didn’t that sound suitably whiny? Anyhow.) Usually when I come home from work, I expect to Get Things Done, and by that I mean draw in my sketchbook or make progress on any of the 5 projects I have going or learn some more AS3 or finish a book. But instead, tonight, I read Google Reader. I read Google Reader’s 1000+ unread entries for 5 hours straight, interspersed with link-swapping via IM and Twitter-monitoring. While Blipping songs. And Wikipedia-surfing. And petting the cat.

Judging by tonight and the frequency with which tonight’s scenario has occurred over the past 3 months, I have pretty much become Web 2.0′s bitch. But now is not the time to feel self conscious about having potentially earned a new stereotypical designation. Now is the time to think carefully about why I do this, why I feel compelled to sacrifice hours of my life at a time to basically what amounts to info-hoarding.

Actually, I think that’s the core of the reason: I do this because I feel an imperative to info-hoard like none other. And I feel this imperative because I’ve come to believe (and been taught to believe) that, in order to be a truly inspired producer of cultural capital, to be a damn excellent artist or designer or whatever you want to call it, I must first and foremost be extremely well-informed. About everything from molecular gastronomy and its impact on European urban tourism to the mating rituals of the lesser paradise fowl. Because you never know—inspiration pops out of the most unexpected stimuli. Perhaps out of vast reserves of raw knowledge, some rare and lovely wisdom will crystallize.

(Thinking this, believing in this, has become so second-nature to me that I am almost positive I have already blogged about this before, but the blog search engine tells me nothing so far has been written. So onwards I go.)

This is what fuels my Google Reader marathons. But invariably after these, I feel tired and not at all like I have learned much of anything. For a while I was pondering why this is so. I can’t help but feel that at least part of it is due to the fact that my brain does not retain fleeting facts or topics very well. Some people seem to be able to capture and store a great percentage of the topics that pass their way each day. I’m not one of them. I usually read, react, and soon after forget.

But then I realized that not many people who go on visits to the blogosphere read to retain—it is far more likely that they read to entertain. Rather than look for stuff and then try to incorporate it into their way of thinking forever, most people probably just have a good chuckle or raised-eyebrow moment, and then let it go. My other friend Eileen says she keeps a category labeled “bored” in her Google Reader, and this is by far her biggest category. Whereas, come to think of it, I am never really bored—I am never really bored because web-hopping feels less like a casual last-ditch way to pass the time and more like a monumental task, like reading 12 chapters before you go to bed. Even while I have fun doing it, it is nevertheless fuelled with the imperative to learn, learn and hoard and incorporate, so that one day I can become as smart as Stephen Sagmeister or as perceptive as John Maeda or as witty as Paula Scher.

But it doesn’t work. Ask me if I recall even 5 things that I saw within the past hour. Five is the below-average standard for items cached in short-term memory. I can recall only two. Ready? Fountain throwies and World Builder video from Vimeo.

This is what you get, Tina, from self-imposed force-feeding.

Oy vey. Maybe this is not the right way to do this.

I am pretty much an impatient person when it comes to self-expectations. This is probably my biggest problem on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes impatience is warranted—you kind of need it on the job if you want to complete something on time in a programming language you barely know—but other times it’s a big handicap, and I need to get better at recognizing when it is.

So all this rambling has lead me to the conclusion that my mega-surfing sessions need to be… made less mega. I can’t have too much at once, because if so, I find myself so frantic to ingest that I barely digest, and as a result, after five hours, there isn’t much to show for it. Whereas if I’d spent the five hours drawing in my sketchbook, learning the Renaissance-y way through painstaking hand-drawn gestures and notes, I’d retain a lot more, and have some wonderful sketches to show for it. Or if I’d read a book on any one single topic… sigh.

But I still need at least some of the crazy variety that the internet offers.

This raises the question of how to possibly take in the internet (and the world, by proxy) in small enough chunks.

It is (they are) so, so, soooooo big.

Oh man, thinking about that kind of size makes my knees feel weak, like standing in an endless field and experiencing some kind of horiontal acrophobia.

Perhaps that is a question for an other day. I’m tired, and tomorrow there is work. Off to bed!

EDIT: Tangentially related article about design’s place in the world of information – “not everything is design, but design is everything.”

Before, I would spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to shade correctly, how to create a certain effect in Photoshop, how to draw the human body, etc. Now I spend the majority of my deciding between serif vs. sans-serif, humanist vs. grotesque, red vs. slightly orange, big vs. small, photo A or photo B, javascript or actionscript, etc. etc. The question is no longer “how,” but “why” this one element or style or whatever is better than the alternative.

I think a lot of things came together to abet this transition, among them primarily the huge assortment of free Photoshop tutorials on the fabulous, crazy Internets. Now I don’t have to really learn how to do anything anymore – if I desire a certain effect, I just look up the appropriate page from my vast Delicious bookmarks collection and get the info I need right away to recreate the target look. Likewise, even though I know fairly well how to render a human figure by hand, I never really will need to, because iStockphoto.com has a ridiculously large collection of human vector figures in any imaginable pose, to be had for just a few dollars and a click. The amount of readymade resources in the design world are bafflingly huge. No wonder nowadays I find myself pondering “why” rather than “how.”

Perhaps this is just another difference between how an art-oriented mind vs. a design-oriented mind operates. Art more is about the visual expression of the unfamiliar or original. Design is about the arrangment of elements (implied: preexisting) to make something pleasing. A long time ago, I thought art and design were quite similar in process because they require many of the same visual skills, but now more and more, I’m reevaluating this belief.

However this doesn’t mean the two can’t mesh, as I would always aim for – it merely means that each discipline has a lot to learn from the process of the other. For instance, I wonder if the design process is not limiting itself by focusing too much on picking and choosing between preexisting elements. I know that there are designers out there who go all out and make/experiment with everything from scratch, but that’s not the way it is taught or practiced at a lot of firms, including the one I work at. That is something I would like to take away from the art mindset more.

Sometimes its good to be aware of what you are doing, how you are operating on a day-to-day level, what conventions you’ve fallen into and others that you’ve abandoned. Which is why I write these rambly entries, I guess. =)