Iteration and It’s Bounds

Upon reading this weeks readings I began to struggle with many different contradictions that were being tossed around. In looking at Steven Dow’s “How Prototyping Practices Affect Design Results,” the first sentence summed it up quite clearly, “Iterate rapidly.” If that was all you read, you would have easily understood the concept. It is regularly taught and practiced in the architectural field. This concept of working with multiple ideas at once is a difficult one to cope with though. While presenting many ideas at a beginning or midway critic is always a good sign, doing so with a client may not be as widely accepted. Looking back at Herb Simon’s “The Science of Design” he mentioned how today’s clients want polished ideas to be presented to them. Not too polished of course, but a solid enough design. Balancing between the two is a difficult dilemma. I know for a fact that I have ventured beyond the boundary lines of iteration to the love of a single idea. Is this not an important part of the design process though? I guess it takes knowing when a design encompasses as much as it can and settling for that one design. Simon refers to it as satisficing. It is almost impossible to settle for optimization when it is almost impossible to achieve in a world of multiple design solutions. Satisfaction is about all you can hope for.