This post is in response to a post by Brett, one of my classmates here at LSU.
ob·jec·tive [uhb-jek-tiv] –adjective
5. not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice;
6. based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion.
As fresh-from-the-outside-world graduate students in a highly-regarded design program, we desire objectivity.
It would seem that objectivity is the path to getting the answer. What is the right design for a certain situation, and why is that the case? If there is no objective correct answer to the design problem, then my design can’t be wrong, incorrect, or misguided, as I have been told by review panels before. I can take critique as a suggestion for a new idea that I hadn’t thought of before, but I should never take critique that is not “based on facts; unbiased” as being the answer.
I’ve been told numerous times before that there is no “right answer” for design problems. This makes sense to me logically. Because design involves aesthetics and personal preference as much as it involves mathematical relationships or “hard science”, it is subjective by nature. Why, then, do we have a review process? I think we have a design process because the information we receive is valuable, if filtered by the student in a way that makes it relevant. If a reviewer says “I would have designed this element this way, and this is why”, the student should then receive the information and put it in context of the overall design problem that the student is trying to solve. As design students who are seeking to learn objective facts about Landscape Architecture, we need to take critique as being subjective advice, and then add that design idea to our mental directory of possible solutions to a problem.
Seeking objectivity is a lofty goal. We want to not only know that there is an answer out there, but also to find that answer. As design professionals, a large part of our job will be to create a design that convincingly solves a particular problem for our client. We don’t need to have the objective answer to the problem, because an objective answer doesn’t exist (or so I’ve been told). Subjectivity, then, is valuable in that it adds to our mental design database of possible solutions, so that when the time comes to design, we can look through our now numerous design ideas and decide what works best.
