Upon re reading: “on late style: Music and Literature Against the Grain” by Edward W Said Pantheon Books, 2006:
My good friend and colleague Michael Punt, suggested I read Said’s final book before he died. For some reason it left a trace. As I reached my mid-seventies, I became aware I was applying some of his theories to practice.
Said argues that unfinished imperfect work, like Beethovens and Schubert’s ‘Differences between Beethovens Fifth Symphony and Schuberts Unfinished Symphony’ was more influential than some of their early perfect work.
The easy part is that I kept repeating the aphorism that “better is the enemy of good enough”. This is NASA speak that when a rocket launch approaches, you cannot be a perfectionist anymore. The analogy is that one of the 5Rs that guide our lab design is “Rocket Launch’ encouraging lab members to leave as soon as possible to find a better and better paid job.
The context is “experience design” as advocated by our lab co-founder Cassini Nazir that is now being applied via UX/UI and other methods to redesigning the experiences in our lab. Jacob Hunwick, facing the end of his undergraduate education in a few weeks, is working on a new project he won’t have time to finish on Water Rights.
About the Author:
Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.
He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.