drawing, climbing, filling maps

No good project in this world would ever get started without a moment of exuberant optimism. How else would you cross the gap that lies between where you are now and what you want to get done? Optimism is the fuel that gets projects started, but persistence gets them done.Maps often describe the boundaries between this and that, and us and them. Inspired by personal events in their own lives, Nicky and Mason used this arc to look deeply at the border between the United States and Mexico. They each discovered something unexpected - tunnels dug nine stories deep into the ground, stories of smugglers risking their lives to get people across the border, and more - and developed informed opinions of border policies and politics which they organized and shared with the school. From compelling statistics to re-enacting the interception of a border crossing.Quinn shared a progress report on the development of his multi-player cooperative role-playing game. Working with multiple experts from the game-design world, he's been learning the difference between good ideas and good game-play and how one evolves into the other.Max thought that the hardest part about writing a book would be the writing - turns out it was the editing. Max spoke eloquently about the struggles of a writer - the blank page, the distractions, the self-doubt, the plot problems - and how he worked through them to finish his first novella. We were gripped by the action in the excerpt he read.From the department of Be Careful What You Wish For, Madison and Zada may have thought that they were "getting away" with something when they proposed the creation of a mythical island as a project for maps, but when the work started and questions started coming up they realized that there might actually be more work in really inventing a culture than just studying one. When every narrative invention leads to a "why," they wrestled with what history really is.It seems like a simple question: "will comparing seemingly unrelated kinds of data on a map reveal previously overlooked relationships?" Isaac wanted to build a map of San Francisco that he could use to explore different kinds of data. He set about to draw every street in every neighborhood in San Francisco and mastered the basic drawing capabilities of Adobe Illustrator, one of the more inscrutable tools in the Graphic Designer's toolbox. Like a monk working on an illuminated manuscript, he transcribed and interpreted the pixels painstakingly into vectors that he could work with. His work-in-progress result may communicate more about his tenacity than his data (some of which he lost when his laptop died). At one point, Isaac pulled up Natasha's layered transparencies to explain how virtual layers work in Illustrator, much to her delight.Henry is the first to admit that a climbing wall is a bit of a stretch as a project for maps (aside from the "you know, climbing routes" argument), but there is an audacity to the project that appealed to the whole school. He will be coming back this summer to finish it up, but it is already inspiring to see it rising above the cork floor. Working with Josh and experts from the local climbing gym, he shared with us the process of developing and refining his ideas and plans until he had something that would be fun to climb, feasible to build, and safe to use for years to come, handling the questions with confidence as he hung monkey-like from his structure.Here at Brightworks, we don't always look for "done," which can so easily be a disguised version of "stopped," choosing instead the more elusive but valuable condition of being good work with deep emotional and intellectual investment.