Wrong Design

I read a really interesting article in Wired magazine last week about the concept of “wrong design.” It began with a story about the artist Edward Degas and his work Jockeys Before the Race. The painting has three beautifully rendered horses with riders preparing for a race. What apparently made the painting radical for the time, however, was something seemingly very simple--the addition of a pole running vertically through the foreground of the painting and right through one of the horses. Degas did this to purposefully create something that wasn’t pleasing to the eye, and because of this, Degas was basically a laughing stock in the art world for a period of time. But it turns out that Degas knew what he was doing--his work soon caught the eye of other artists that wanted to do something unconventional. The author of the article explains this concept of “wrong design” much better than I can, so here it is:

“Degas was engaged in a strategy that has shown up periodically for centuries across every artistic and creative field. Think of it as one step in a cycle: In the early stages, practitioners dedicate themselves to inventing and improving the rules—how to craft the most pleasing chord progression, the perfectly proportioned building, the most precisely rendered amalgamation of rhyme and meter. Over time, those rules become laws, and artists and designers dedicate themselves to excelling within these agreed-upon parameters, creating work of unparalleled refinement and sophistication—the Pantheon, the Sistine Chapel, the Goldberg Variations. But once a certain maturity has been reached, someone comes along who decides to take a different route. Instead of trying to create an ever more polished and perfect artifact, this rebel actively seeks out imperfection—sticking a pole in the middle of his painting, intentionally adding grungy feedback to a guitar solo, deliberately photographing unpleasant subjects. Eventually some of these creative breakthroughs end up becoming the foundation of a new set of aesthetic rules, and the cycle begins again.”

So how can this idea apply to the work that we do with students every day? I think the message is that when we think we’ve got something down--something we’ve done for a long time with our students, something that people say is the “right” way to do things, something that we think is perfect just the way it is--maybe that’s the time to mess it up a little bit. Maybe it’s time to make things a little bit imperfect and see what happens--you never know when you’re going to find the next great trend.