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Remove the liquor cabinet and
you’ll ruin my boat…
If you are an owner discussing how your boat should be
designed, this comment may be a reasonable guidepost to achieving that
goal. Unfortunately, I heard it attributed to a yacht designer
chastising a client about how that owner’s boat would be doomed by the
owner’s own selfish choices. The problem was not the advice itself, but
the suggestion that the designer somehow was the arbiter of how this
boat… or for that matter any boat would or should be used. Now before I
get taken to task, I’m not talking about things genuinely affecting
safety or performance. They can result in a line drawn in the sand. I’m
talking about the things that make an owner’s boat his own.
The fore mentioned designer obviously lost total track of the client’s
needs. Either that; or he was just professionally lazy, having found
that stampeding the client made his own life easier. The technique
didn’t work, the client did built a big boat, but there was NO Liquor
Cabinet. Plus he never missed an opportunity to tell this story to
anyone who would listen. That same chutzpah often presents itself as
simple inflexibility. Unfortunately such narrow vision is probably as
harmful to the designer as it is to the client. Personally, I have
learned more exploring things that I was uncertain would succeed, than I
have drawing the same comfortable thing, over and over…. I learn
something on every new boat I design.
Yes, sometimes at first blush an idea may seem wacky. I marvel at how
often with exploration an idea matures into an interesting concept and
improves not just the boat itself, but the boat for its owner. There is
nothing wrong with “tried and true” as long as the platitude fulfills a
need. If it does not however, that solution may simply be the cop out of
a lazy designer.
But that’s just my opinion….
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