Jason Tselentis points out what, in retrospect, should have beeen obvious.
Rather than learn from the critiques and repeated suggestions to change one thing or another, they leave for another major: All of these changes? My work is bad? Forget it, I’ll go elsewhere. Some will argue that these drop outs play into the natural state of attrition, sorting out the can-do students from the cannot. Does it have to be this way? Why can’t all design students learn to cope with stressful critiques and do-it-over suggestions? Because some of them have been fawned over during years of grammar and high school, and it’s not easy to teach them new tricks. […]
Designing and building a home is not like graphic design in scope, and therein lies the problem. If audiences see large-scale designs happening between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. Central Standard Time on Sundays, they expect (demand!) smaller-scale design problems to happen much much faster. I call it the Time Compression Paradox: If a large-scale project should happen in one hour; a project 1/10 its size should happen in 1/10 the time. The most prevalent place this happens with design students is software. […]
[D]esign has become synonymous with fame. Go to school; learn design; get a degree; get a job; and get famous. This is the American Idol Paradox: as more and more people take pride in looking at themselves or getting looked at by others, less and less of us will actually become famous – fame may even disappear. Paradox aside, design isn’t about fame – it’s about unfame. Servicing the client is one of the most unfamous things you can do because it’s their name and their dollar [Cf. Saville].