When you’re designing, does it make more sense to go for quality
and try to come up with the best possible design?
Or does it make more sense to go for quantity first as a path to try and learn and understand?
There’s a story that Bayles and Orland tell about an art teacher who divides the class in half,
and he tells one half of the class,
“You’re going to be graded exclusively on the quality of the very best thing that you make.”
He tells the other half of the class,
“You’re going to be graded on the quantity of things that you make.
Doesn’t matter how good it is; all that matters is how much that you make.”
And what this teacher found was that while the quantity group was busily churning our piles of work —
and learning from their mistakes —
the quality group sat around theorizing, and at the end of the day
they had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and piles of dead clay.
So this gives us some intuition that rapidly producing many alternatives has a lot of value.
And to explore this further, Steven and I had people create egg drop devices.
You may have done this when you were in high school.
If you haven’t, it’s a lot of fun, and I suggest trying it out.
And what you can do with an egg drop device,
is you’re building a contraption that will protect an egg from a fall.
Here we threw one out my third-story office window and, lo and behold, the egg survives.
And we tested a whole bunch of people in variance of this design and people come up with all sorts of stuff.
They come up with good ideas, and bad ideas, and creative solutions, and really unimaginative ones.
And one thing that is really interesting is that,
in aggregate, people often pick one idea early on, and they stick with it to their detriment.
And so here is a couple participants talking about that experience.
(No, I don’t know, for some reason this is… this seems to be the only idea,
in that there needs to be a platform and then it’s going to cushion, if possible, with the materials.
I… I don’t see any, any other way.
>> I’m not a very good outside-the-box thinker,
so I kind of just had one idea and I was going to try and make it work.
>> I kind of went with the whole parachute idea, and what I had from the beginning. So.
>> This is the best approach for such a design.)