Sisters and Friends
Chapter 27
If it's Not Broken…
"I did a simple cosmetic refresh of the basic tool." Quinn stood her ground. "I couldn't fault the traditional form, in terms of balance, usability and function."
Marco, the instructor, looked this upstart student in the eye and waved his arm at the wall, covered with renderings of carpenter's hammers. "So you're saying that your classmates are wrong?"
She took a slow breath, managing to keep her nerves in check. She was starting to get pissed off. This instructor knew how to push her buttons, but she knew that these lower level classes were designed to weed out the weak. Still, she could feel her Morgendorffer blood begin to boil.
Keep calm. "No. This is naturally subjective, and all these concepts have a lot of aesthetic appeal. I'm just saying that from my perspective the existing form factors for hammers are highly evolved. Carpenter's hammers in the 1800's look pretty much the way they do today. The weighting and mass distribution is neutral, and works with a wide range of grip techniques and readily adapts to the full range of user hand sizes."
"What are you basing this position on?"
"Direct observation. I got permission from framing and trim carpenters to shoot video of them at work, and did some basic kinematic studies as well as learning to use a hammer myself." She grinned at the class, trying to moderate the tension in the room. "I'm an expert at bending nails. I spent an hour pounding five pounds of assorted nails into scrap wood. I wouldn't hire me to make a doghouse."
"Yet your renderings show alternate forms." The instructor stared her down. "But with very little innovation, and no radical attempt at pushing the envelope." He seemed to look down his nose at her. "In a word, weak."
"Because you cannot depart from the traditional manufacturing techniques used to make the hammer head itself!" She grabbed one of her mockups and jabbed a finger at the surfaces opposite the striking face. "The hammer head has to be a steel forging! It's the only cost effective method that achieves the mass, toughness, and strength needed. The claw can't be thicker than this or you'll never get it under a nail's head. The crown is shaped this way to create a moving fulcrum that applies maximum leverage at first, and then more speed to pull it out as the embedded length of the nail naturally lessens. It's a cam! Generations of carpenters and toolmakers knew what they were doing!"
Quinn forced herself to calm down, hoping that her outburst would not be seen as a loss of control. She believed every word she had uttered. They were crazy if they thought that a bunch of college kids knew better than a skilled worker. They didn't build houses for a living. "The assignment was to design a better hammer. I did my research, and I determined that there was nothing functionally wrong with existing hammers. The only thing left to do was to improve its visual appeal. If the purpose of this assignment was to satisfy a manufacturer's request to create a tool with sales appeal then it's a matter of finish, color and surface detail. But if I am supposed to design a functionally better hammer, then I say this is a problem that does not exist. People have tried to sell 'improved' hammers in the past, with little success."
Marco smiled, pointing at another student's design. "Look at this one. This is a shorter tool, using a wrist lanyard like a mace to recover driving momentum."
Quinn shook her head and sighed. It was likely that she would be making another enemy today. Everyone in the class worked hard, and to criticize another student's effort was going to step on toes. However, this wasn't a popularity contest. She tried to keep her tone as neutral as possible.
"I agree that this is original. But I would bet that it would be prone to bending nails and it would be more difficult to pull them. There would be a loss of control over the impact angle if you didn't strike the nail dead center, because your wrist would not be able to control the sided to side tilt of the head without having a firm grip on the handle. That's how you bend a nail. And without a longer handle, pulling out a nail would be harder, because you lose a lot of leverage."
Marco seemed to sneer at her. Quinn wondered if he might be a distant relative of Sandi Griffen. "So you're saying that Jon's design is crap."
There was silence in the room. It was as though a mousetrap had been set yet again. This instructor seemed to enjoy pitting the students against each other.
Don't take this personally. She'd had a lot of her efforts torn to shreds in front of the class. That's how it was done. Daria had warned her of this, that it was par for the course in any field where quality was largely subjective. What would her sister say? She would apply logic, of course, in equal measure to art. Underneath her brilliant creativity, Daria was a walking encyclopedia.
She stared her instructor down for a long moment. Butting heads with Marco would not be good for her grade point average. But this wasn't only about grades, was it? She knew that most of the other students were likely better at pure styling than she was. The term favored at the moment for pretty designs without real thought was something that Quinn seemed to recall hearing in one of Daria's DVDs.
Skin Jobs. Pretty on the outside. That's what eighty percent of the design renderings in front of her looked like.
She saw Jon leaning against the wall, arms crossed, glaring at her. He was wildly creative, and it was fun bouncing ideas off of him. It would suck if he stopped talking to her.
"It depends on how Jon interpreted your assignment. It was vague, and I think that might have been deliberate. If Jon decided to create something that would have appeal to a non-professional, someone who only needed a hammer once in awhile, then his design would be appropriate. It would be easy to store in a drawer. It's different, and cool that way. But I chose to look at the assignment from the perspective of someone who needs a hammer to eat, and so knows the tool inside and out. We're likely designing for different buyers, so any comparison is apples and oranges."
A few of the other students nodded their heads. Dan, usually a contrarian, surprisingly seemed to agree with her. Many of the others, though, stood silently with arms crossed. Clearly, there were some in the program that didn't like her at all, including this instructor.
Quinn could hear her sister's voice in her head.
"You have looks, brains and talent. Of course some people are gonna be threatened by you. A lot of people are just plain gonna hate your guts, and that's something you need to come to terms with. Some of those people will be in a position to make your life more difficult. They may try to trip you up. Deal with it respectfully, but stick with what you believe in."
Dr. Ron Maas leaned back in his chair. His staff had gone over the list of students that would not make the cut. Fully thirty percent would wash out of the introductory series. Of those that remained, another thirty percent would drop out in their second year of the program.
On the opposite end of the scale, one student in the directed projects class had actually managed to submit three utility patent applications for technologies developed under her direction. As a result of this work she had presented for review a functioning biomedical device. He had asked for copies of the applications and noted that she had listed the names of those that she had recruited first as principal inventors, taking second billing for herself.
A born leader, giving credit where it was due. Still, if not for her creative vision and design acumen, none of this work would have happened at all. It was unheard of for a first year to have achieved such a thing. Then again, her mother was a partner in a highly regarded law firm, and her father was currently running a company based on the product that had won her a coveted admission to the Industrial Design program. She already had a number of patents awarded, although none of the other students knew that yet.
This same student had also managed to earn the ire of Professor Marco Pavoni, resident Devil's Advocate and tenured Grand Inquisitor. To Maas, a first year who managed to stand up to and infuriate him was clearly quite a talent. Getting Marco to reconsider her final grade had been a royal pain in the ass.
Dr. Maas would be submitting her work for consideration in the Student Division of the Industrial Designers Society of America/ Business Week magazine competition. It would be a rare thing indeed if someone like Quinn,so early in her training, won a medal in the IDSA competition.
Perhaps he could sucker Marco into a bet. He could use another bottle of good single malt Scotch.