I’ve been thinking a lot about these two guys lately, as I’ve been rather busy in the past months trying to acquire a lot of them both. I’ve come to the conclusion that, in order to be happy, I must have an equal balance of both.

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.