What Is Knowledge?

   I still remember that in the lecture of this week, one speaker a question: what things you consider as knowledge? That is actually quite interesting and inspirational for us to know what kind of altitude we should have towards learning.

   In our normal understandings, knowledge mostly means the skills especially technical skills. For example, before we enter the university, all the information we acquired in the class were thought as knowledge. As a result, the course grade we got was treated as the standard to judge how rich your knowledge was. But as we have learnt so many different kinds of things after we entered the university, the scope of knowledge is no longer as narrow as we thought before. Communication skills, self-study ability, project management skills and even the principles in life are all the knowledge you cannot learn from lecture, tutorial or workshop but they are proved to be quite essential. In this case, knowledge is more about your understandings for several aspects of the world other than the useless calculation skills or business cases you learn in the textbooks in order to get higher grade or gain more money.

   For the experience I gain so far from CS3216, I indeed have the feeling that knowledge is not restricted to what we can learn from lectures, tutorial sheets, online documentation content or experience shared by skillful seniors. When I do front-end design, design for UI and UX is not the mechanized and tedious coding work but really depends on your life experience, your arts connoisseurship and even your personalities. Good arts connoisseurship results in harmonious UI structuring splendid UI appearance and life experience and your personalities decide whether you can provide the results that users really want under their oral requirements for you. Steve Jobs said that when users propose the requirements for the products, in most case they won’t correctly deliver their desires and that is your responsibility to figure out what are hidden under the surface. Therefore, this design for UX requires a lot on your comprehensive abilities or in another word, knowledge. That’s why we can see that the persons who design the most excellent front-end are not just experts in computer technology but also out-standing in many areas which may seems not to be relevant with design.

   Live and learn. That is not just a good learning attitude. Moreover, it tells us that knowledge exist in almost everywhere in our lives. Living and learning help us discover the knowledge hidden inside lives and that probably will be more important and valuable than what we gain from standard textbooks and trainings.