Originally written in Traditional Chinese: Minerva Immersion Week 第 3 天：破掉的盤子，和演化的設計
Minerva Immersion Week, Day 3 (Oct 20): a broken plate in the morning, evolution in the afternoon.
Context: Minerva's MDA is an online master's for working professionals. Immersion Weeks bring us to one city for a week. I have finished my MDA; Tokyo is my third and last.
10:50, Asakusa. Kintsugi, the Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery and dusting the cracks with gold. Our instructor said: this time we don't hide the crack line, we highlight it.
My plate carried Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, my favorite painting. It was broken into three pieces, and I chose it on purpose: the cracks avoided the crest of the wave and Mount Fuji, and the gold lines I added did not cover the original ones.
I thought this would be a simple cultural activity. Instead, while scraping off the excess glue, I kept thinking about the imperfect things in my own life. Kintsugi is not about embracing imperfection, or forcing yourself to like it. The existence of imperfection is good in itself.
Afternoon, Yokohama. NOSIGNER, the design firm founded by Eisuke Tachikawa, author of Evolutional Creativity. He signed the Chinese edition I brought from Taiwan with a single character: 進, "to advance."
"Relationship becomes a form."
Creativity resembles one phenomenon: evolution, because both adapt.
Adaptation is not the perfect answer, it is a good enough answer to survive. Imperfection is the key of evolution. Variation is the source of survival.
"Answer is cheap now." The question is the key, and it must be a long-term one.
AI is smart, but also eager to please, sometimes untruthful, short-sighted, and lazy. You need to be the first to question it.
I asked him: evolution needs many variants, but exams accept only one standard answer. Isn't the test system anti-evolution? In Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, tests are everywhere. How should we face it in the age of AI?
He said, "That's true. Definitely." We ran out of time, and afterward he told me I could write to him and continue the conversation. I will. But first, I think this question is mine to answer.
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