from Hacker News

Have Computers Made Architects Less Disciplined? Deep Dive into Design Evolution

by kurinikku on 11/13/23, 10:19 PM with 4 comments

• by karmakaze on 11/14/23, 12:32 AM

  > “The bad thing about computers is that they make everything run very fast, so fast that you can have a baby in nine weeks instead of nine months. But you still need nine months, not nine weeks, to make a baby.” Some teaching programs have taken steps to remedy, or at least mitigate, the situation. Yale has a summer program in Rome in which students are required to sketch by hand. McGill University continues to require classes in freehand life drawing and sketching school in the summer. The University of Miami introduces computers only in the second year of its program.

  This all sounds so bad--like a cargo cult. Design isn't the building blocks on which code is built, it's the other way around. As you make larger more complex programs, you need the higher level picture to organize your processes. I certainly hope these programs are for UX.

• by Aromasin on 11/14/23, 7:13 AM

  Is this not the classic story about the 50 students who make 1 pot well, versus 50 who make 100 pots quickly? The people who make 100 pots always end up with the best pot. Why then do architecture schools, from what I'm reading, believe the reverse to be true?

  I can reconcile with the thought that perhaps things move too fast, but if that is backed by spaced repetition of the same task, then the outcome is generally superior from my experience. Why does the same logic not apply here? Reiterating the same design 20 times over seems just as rigorous, if not more, tham doing it once.