Prototyping and Patience
Not letting the road blocks get to you is hard
I will admit. I cried a little over my Rhino/Grasshopper project last week. I could not figure out how to get the paths to join in Illustrator, despite going through so many tutorial rabbit holes, and the chances of a laser cut happening were slim.
When I finally lost all hope, I sent the file to my instructor, and voila! He responded with a simple fix in Rhino, and a short tutorial video. I was able to make this the following day:
It reminded me of something that happened quite a bit, when my partner and I were struggling over a Raspberry Pi prototype using Python and the absolutely horrendous but required OpenCV software installation.
My partner Eric would suddenly seem to know exactly when it was time to stop, take a break, and put it down, despite my protests. Somehow, it always magically started working as soon as we picked it up again, or at least the right troubleshooting technique would pop into one of our heads (ie me asking: did we download it into the right python file version? answer: nope.)
I chalk it up to my partner having ample experience with things not working in programming, engineering, and research. But I also realized, that if I want to be a better designer, I need to know when to put it down, when and how to troubleshoot, and when to ask for help.
No one instantly picks up a new software or work flow process, and I think we could all benefit from being a little easier on ourselves.
