In Chasing the Perfect, designer Natalia Ilyin investigates the roots of modernist design, and looks at how it has trickled through our education system and into the philosophy of today's generation of designers. She uses her own experience as a RISD MFA student to talk about her own struggle to conform to this idea before coming to the realization that she appreciates and even seeks out the messy, the creative, the disordered and the "real" in her work.

This book resonated in two ways, the first being that she wrote her book after going through the same graduate program that I find myself in now. Secondly, she was arguing for a tactile, messy, unexpected and "real" design aesthetic that I find appealing even if I don't always seek it in my own work.

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It makes me think about the two endpoints of this spectrum that she talks about, and it echoes the struggle between online and real world interaction.