The Nil Journal

Nil's Musing: Shooting for the Moon

Author - Ankita Singh

Central to the process of design is the ability to experiment. To venture into uncharted territories. To explore the new. To step into the unknown. However, experiment is always followed by its entourage - risk. They love each other’s company and are never seen apart. Anyone who experiments knows that they will be dealing with the risk of failure. The risk of falling into a ditch because the path ahead is not lit with street lights. The risk of being tagged as foolish because you took a path that hasn’t seen any milestones. The risk of not being able to hitch a ride because you are an unknown traveller. The risk of letting go of another path that is comfortable, easy and very alluring to your tired feet.

But it is only when we take risks, when we experiment, are we truly alive. Along the path of experimentation, we will always find ourselves under the scrutiny of nay-sayers, telling us that we need to stop and change directions. But as experiment architects, we know that the act of immersing ourselves into trying something new and it not working, is far more satisfying than not trying at all. The world needs experiment architects like Nil, even more today, because of the tough times we live in, increasingly becoming complex and full of conflicts. As design-doers, we must take the risk to enter into the unknown areas because only with experimentation can we design solutions that are path-breaking, resilient, and cognizant of the multiple contexts we live in today.

The great Italian physicist and member of the Manhattan Project team Enrico Fermi commented similarly, about what can happen when you do an experiment. “There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.” (As quoted in Nuclear Principles in Engineering (2005) by Tatjana Jevremovic, p 397)”

So shoot for the moon!