ABSTRACT
Any experienced design instructor realizes at some point that one of the most important indicators of effective teaching is being able to cultivate a sense of empowerment, self-confidence, and motivation in one’s students. Yet traditional forms of academic teaching, even in the design fields, often unintentionally limit the opportunities to encourage confidence and motivation in direct and meaningful ways. We all too often ask students to demonstrate that they can conform to established methods and practices in their respective areas of study, and we set up abstract boundaries framing how their design investigations, discoveries, and proposals emerge. In so many words, we ask for what we expect should come of a project. However, the transformative experiences in learning are most often not expected; in fact, they are quite often messy and unpredictable, reminding us that we cannot always know where our practice will take us. Another way to describe this experience is becoming “lost.” “To be lost is to be fully present, and one does not get lost, but one loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state, achievable through geography,” writes Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005, p. 6). Solnit makes the distinction between losing oneself and getting lost, describing the former as losing that which is familiar and the latter as “acquiring that which is not yet known.” Teaching students to be open to discovering the world in a new way and embracing being lost in it is a powerful and vital part of their development as designers and citizens. For instructors, becoming lost is also important, for when we become lost with and alongside our students we also gain opportunities of becoming newly aware and rediscovering the improvisational capacities of our own education and design practices.
