Design acumen and the design-minded
 

This post got me thinking.....not that I have seen many of these types of poorly designed holes, but rather it got me thinking about the minds of those that have designed courses and those that aspire to in the future.

Acumen is "the ability to judge well; keen discernment; insight". What sort of design acumen and/or design experience gathered outside of disc golf course design will most likely result in the best courses?

i'd think anybody with a background in spacial design of any kind would have an advantage; even if you're talking about residential architects.

Three things that helped me were experience in game design, playing blindfold chess and participating in the sport of orienteering prior to disc golf.

I can definitely see the orienteering helping, I did quite a bit of that growing up including designing orienteering courses for beginners.

Very interesting on the orienting. Are the helpful skills in something concrete or more spatial/abstract? I have only done Orienteering using topographical maps, but never competing....so I'm most likely completely ignorant of the organized sport.

Architects are great at creating problems.

Interesting question - curious to see what else is said.
:popcorn:

they say that landscape architecture is an old man's profession, because of the experience needed to make projects a legitimate success from multiple standpoints and the network of people needed to make it happen. most golfers are primarily concerned with their personal conception of play value for a course. a successful course's design involves much more than that. in other words the skill most likely to yield a great course is not a skill, but the gestalt of skills in the designer.

Especially true of those without "real world" wisdom. Some really nifty designs can lack functionality, efficiency, durability, maintainability, manufacturability, etc. Or they might excel in one area and fall flat in all others. An important question is "who is this design for and what is it intended to accomplish for them?"

Something else that might be useful is landscaping experience to understand how various foliage and terrain will react to foot traffic and what types of plants will make god obstacles or reasonable amounts of maintenance.