With the end of the fall semester and my quickly approaching expulsion from the cushy cushion that is the student’s life, I have been reflecting on what it means to “learn” something. This past semester has been all about “applying what I’ve learned,” according to my professors. From my view, this mostly consisted of realizing that I’ll have to unlearn a lot in order to deal with the real world. Some things will have to be learned the hard way. And some school learning is just plain wrong.

During the semester I spend my time making things, staring at them, then changing them. It involves a lot of Adobe products, and a lot of being alone at my desk, late at night. There’s usually music, coffee, and frequent blog-checking breaks. There is no structure beyond the deadline.

Since the semester ended, two weeks ago, I’ve been voraciously consuming webcasted lectures from Yale and UC Berkeley. They allow you to choose any class, regardless of the fact that you don’t have the prereqs. I enjoy the feeling of being in over my head. (Physics! yes!) I can even pick and choose individual topics within the semester. I can listen in front of my computer, or bring the course on my ipod. Unfortunately, they don’t give away the textbooks with the lectures.

You can learn a lesson, you can learn it the hard way, you can re-learn and un-learn; you can become a “lifetime learner.” You can learn by seeing or by doing. You can learn by ear. You can learn by feel. Can you learn by smell? Maybe… according to popular science-lore, our memories are very connected to our noses.

You can design aromas, or experiences involving them. But the design wing, unlike most areas of the art school, has no smell. (We make up for this by having the lounge with the strongest smell. Ugh.) Are professional design studios also lacking? I need to do some research. I know that corporate office environments have raised smelling-like-nothing to a high art; they somehow manage to stifle the odor of anything you bring into the environment.

I like doing work in coffee shops. Being able to stumble out of bed and arrive at a coffee shop with minimal effort is both a quintessential urban experience and an absolutely necessary one. At least for me. The smell of coffee signifies both comfort and exciting ideas; the experience of coffee shops (not just the caffeine) wakes me up, providing enough sensory stimulation to inspire new ideas but not so much to prevent them being recorded. Maybe, to assist in my retention of today’s physics podcast, I should inhale the aroma of some coffee beans while I listen.

I don’t really have a conclusion here, except that talking about “what I learned in design school” will always end in coffee. Design is, more or less, a byproduct of the metabolization of caffeine.