Back from the Future How to Deal with Technological Excitement

The advent of new tools always provokes an uncontrolled and irrational enthusiasm that often leads, initially, towards pointless outcomes and immature solutions. Although is undeniable the value of experimentation, design education specifically should teach how to channel that enthusiasm into an optimized exploratory process. Looking at the present, where desktop manufacturing, electronics or digital tools are fully accessible to the masses, we observe an increase of poor creative material populating the web; this phenomenon could be explained by the fact that nowadays the spread of a newly accessible resource is usually faster than the time needed to understand its real meaning. The topic of this research paper focuses on how deconstruction and oversimplification could represent methods to help students transitioning from enthusiasm to awareness.