YE'VE LEFT A GLIMMER STILL TO CHEER
  THE MAN - THE ARTIFEX
THAT HOLDS IN SPITE O'KNOCKS AND SCALE
  O'FRICTION WASTE AN' SLIP
AN' BY THAT LIGHT - NOW MARK MY WORD-
  WE'LL BUILD THE PERFECT SHIP*

What does building the perfect ship mean? I never had been much of a builder in the conventional sense; I'd rarely built anything beyond the scope of legos by the time I set out on this quest at the age of fourteen. To me building had always been something very physical. One can build a good house, a good machine, a good ship. But what makes a house, a machine, or a ship perfect? Can a flower be a perfect ship? And how does one go about making such a thing? I understood that Mr. Wright, both a revolutionary architect and an artist, was talking about 'building the perfect ship' on a higher level than that of the physical world, but I still did not even have a word to name this concept of 'building the perfect ship,' much less any explanation as to what makes one ship perfect and another bad, or how one can make a ship perfect in the first place.

A few months later I came across the word I was looking for. I was reading an interview of Steve Jobs in Wired, and all of a sudden, Steve Jobs started talking about design. From then on I knew that building the perfect ship meant design, and many of my other questions began to answer themselves, now that they were put in a new context. Here's what Steve Jobs had to say about design:

"Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that."**

The first projects I worked on explicitly as design were, strangely enough, biology labs. I was a freshman at the Kinkaid School at the time. Those first designs were just some basic methods of writing, doing pretty graphs and tables, and so on. My real break into design didn't come until the end of the year.

Freshman biology ends with a foray into a wilderness area behind the school. A friend of mine and I took it upon ourselves to do an extra credit project that would allow anybody to sit down at a computer and look at a collection of pictures of the wilderness area. For four weeks, he and I took some four hundred pictures of this area, downloaded them to a computer, and put them into a program we designed.

The program we designed was a very simple one. When a user launches the program, she gets a black screen with a picture of taken from the beginning of the trail into this wilderness area. By clicking on the middle of the picture, she can 'jump,' and see a picture taken another ten feet down the trail. By clicking on the edges of the picture, she 'turns' to see a picture taken ninety degrees from the previous picture. It was a relatively simple design, but by the end of the year, we had a formidable project completed, covering most all of the trails in a wilderness area about an acre in size.

My friend and I wanted to take the tour to a higher level, and so, over the summer, he and I began working on how to make a better tour of the area. I eventually decided that the best way to do this tour was by making the tour into a lot of web pages, and began looking at how to write our tour in HTML, the programming language used in the world wide web.

By the end of the summer I had written a series of small programs that would take a small bit of information about the pictures taken and turn it into a series of HTML files that made up the new tour. It was a nice system, and as I tried to help my friend get an independent study on the project we had worked on, I began to want to somehow publish my tour, so that faculty and friends could see what we wanted to do.

And thus I began my foray into the world wide web. My original intentions were nothing more than to let another friend review the new tour and tell me what he thought of it. I had never accessed the internet, and had just come to my new school in San Antonio. I started off borrowing someone's America Online account when I wanted to put my tour on the web.

A lot of the work in the new tour had been about design--both design in HTML to make the pages look nice, and design in the helper programs to make the pages work in the first place. I had started to develop my own HTML style by the time I put my tour on the world wide web, and soon, I decided that it was time I put up my own web site too.

Dreamland has been my personal web site for the past year or so. When I sat down to write out this web site, I used all of my skills in programming HTML and all of my knowledge in graphic arts (not that I know a lot about graphic arts but I try to learn) to create a web site I truly felt was beautiful. Dreamland was the first time I designed something beautiful from scratch and realized that it was truly a great design.

And perhaps the rest, as they say, was history. After this foray into designing my web site, I soon started making the school's Science Department web page. In February I became the webmaster of the school; it has been one of my proudest accomplishments, because I got to that job on my own two feet in a span of little more than six months, as I had never even browsed the web before I came to my new school in San Antonio. Design has become a paramount value of life for me, as a shrine to keep holy and as a lens with which to see the rest of the world.

Now that the odyssey is mostly over (though I doubt that any odyssey may come to a complete end), I can look back and see what a great significance design is for me. Design was first a vague word about art, and about building things. Then, design became something I could do. I began to understand that everything around me was composed of design--the house, the car, the flower, the grass, any creation imaginable by man or by the great Artifex Itself. And after six months of trying to implement design, I became a designer. Ever since then I have known that whatever I do in life, I want design to be a part of it.

Notes

** 'Mac' is a reference to the Apple Macintosh. 'Grok' comes from Robert Henlein's book Stranger in a Strange Land. The interview is from Wired issue 4.02, and is by Gary Wolf.
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