The return to daily routine after an inspiring journey is a challenge of focused excitement, taking the energy of the journey and channeling it to the tasks at hand. This is definitely the case since my return from he Art and Code conference at Carnegie Mellon I attended last weekend.  There’s so much I want to study and experiment with but my focus now must be our industry project and other projects that are nearing the end of their development cycle.  

As we begin our last month of the semester, our activities are focused on refinement, refinement of concepts, technologies, and tasks.  Concurrent with the pressures of the industry projects, one of our projects from last semester, Fluxus, has received significant attention from the arts community and we have reopened those files to refine that project as well. Fluxus was created in about 3 weeks, so naturally there are some bumps that need smoothing and some tweaks we want to make after seeing people use it.
 
The notion of refinement in creative practice is imperative.  The artistic mind is explosive – bursting with ideas. But the successful creative mind is both explosive and focused, both the visionary and the doer. The creative mind fluidly shifts gears from breadth thinking to depth thinking, from what to how. It is the process of refinement. As any ‘maker’ of things knows, no matter the medium, the success of a project is in the details. It’s the refinement of the details that differentiates professional work from amateur work; it’s what makes a good project a great project.

With my industry project the process of refinement has been illuminating. At the beginning of the semester we presented a very concrete, somewhat simple, concept to our client and were encouraged to pursue a more abstract route. We went far down the path of abstraction; through discussion our client reinforced the need to anchor it in a more grounded experience. We have now refined our concept to combine elements of both our previous ideas.  

It has been a natural process that evolved from extreme ‘breadth thinking’. Now the challenge is switching gears to depth thinking and bringing our concept to fruition.  Perhaps I’m being a little presumptuous, as we haven’t presented our third iteration to our client yet –we may still have to go back to the drawing board. Nevertheless, I feel confident that we are getting closer. The key however, is to be simultaneously iterating on concepts while developing an adaptable technological infrastructure, while refining you are also building. The capacity to work on the infrastructure while still shaping the vision when working with a deadline is fundamental to the success of adapting to change during the development process.

Harnessing the explosive power of art and the focused energy of creation is the epitome of refinement in both practice and product.

Ryan Nadel is a first year student in the MDM program.