Design Thinking leads to Design Drinking

Today was a big 'push' day, and now I'm wiped.

Left studio a little after 2 am last night, and got up again at 8 this morning for my 9am landscapes class. I had a presentation due on the hydrology and hydaulics of the Demun and Wydown neighborhood. Went pretty well. With only six people in the class, its hard to feel intimidated presenting. Especially when I've got fancy graphics like these:

Afterwards I had about two hours to wrap up and print my Design Thinking concept book spreads. I feel pretty good about how much time I'm spending on it. It's kind of like swimming over a very deep body of water. Just keep swimming; if you think too hard about what you're doing, you'll get bogged down and start to sink. You have to trust your intuition is working towards something, and its the critical mind which simply provides the structure. 

Here are the book spreads:

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture

Anyway, we had 13 students (two DT sections combined) for our review. We started at 1:30* and didn't end until about 6:30. Five hours of nearly nonstop presentations on critical conceptual thinking and we were all fried. I don't know how our critics can handle it. I can barely handle it, and I'm just following along, not even making really critical comments on it. My presentation went ok- I was a  little nervous, but I'm doing work that I proposed, which I'm really interested in, so its a lot easier that way. But it is still intimidating to get up in front of your peers and have your conceptual thinking directly exposed.

Got some good quotes out of the day though:

The pornographic frescoes seem mundane at this point, if you've been on the internet.

and

Bananas suck at making tools.

 and more insightful,

Using something against its purpose [e.g. using a book as a paperweight] liberates things.

And other random bits of knowledge, such as the NSA buying warehouses in the middle of fields and using them as the entrances to elaborate underground research and surveillance centers, and Pompeii's status as basically a seedier version of Atlantic City in Roman Italy, and the role of insurance companies in creating structured segregation in St.Louis.