The day started in a very pleasant way with a tour of the campus. What I saw from the TU-Delft between 10 and 11:30am highly impressed me because it was the first time I visited a real campus: Mines ParisTech (the school I come from) is indeed isolated in a small old building in the center of Paris and has not all these faculties and other equipments. After the tour, I was in a really positive state of mind, saying to myself that the week will be great…
But then, after a quick takeaway lunch, the short lesson about social design of a system with the so-called YUPTA method completely annihilated this first impression. The very short lecture left me completely confused because I didn’t understood the aim of the method. Confusion became even worse with the small exercise: the subject was not clear (as a scientist, I like to have very precise issue and precise assumptions) and I felt ashamed of my poor English during the unprepared presentation.
The discovery of the website “Being-here.net” seemed to be a gigantic waste of time. Why couldn’t we use Google Drive or Dropbox since almost everybody knows how to use these platforms? And when we do have to use this website, we could have filled our profiles in advance if they were created earlier… How am I supposed to add articles to my profile if I haven’t read them? As a result, at 3pm I felt totally lost and seriously thinking about switching with another course.
That is why I went to talk to M. Appelman and he said to me that this kind of feeling was normal during the first day, that people with a scientific education are often lost in the beginning. The point of the course is not to learn concrete techniques of design but is more about co-operating in a team with various skills in order to achieve a project… I must admit that it was unexpected, but this talk persuades me to stay in the course and adapt.
Eventually I am in an ambiguous situation: on the one hand I hope that future lectures and project will be interesting (because there is definitely something interesting in Biomimicry Design) but on the other I know that I will find it boring if they are just like the lecture today.
