Benjamin DeHass | Big Sur, CA
I have been living on the West Coast for roughly two months now, and I recently took my first trip down Highway 1. Prior to coming out here, I never could have imagined a highway being an attraction. I grew up around eight lane highways full of speedsters and slowpokes alike. But when I first looked off the cliffs into the open ocean at sunset, I felt like I had wandered to the edge of the world. This day would not have happened had we followed the original itinerary though.
The original plan was five people and one direction south toward the coast. Over the course of the workday Friday, it spiraled into twelve people and ten locations. The day was mapped from where to get coffee to which park bench to rest at during the afternoon. Every preference accounted for, every hour filled.
We split. Five of us took two anchors: Monterey Bay and Big Sur. Everything between them was open. We ate lunch on the dock, walked the rocks toward Lovers Point, and stopped in Carmel at a bakery downtown. Then we drove south and pulled off wherever the view asked. By the time we reached Point Sur the sun was already going down. We stayed until it was gone.
In optimization, the objective function defines what you are actually trying to maximize. The twelve person itinerary had quietly replaced the real objective with a proxy. A great day became stops completed. Miles covered. Hours filled. Proxies are useful until they become the goal, and then the system delivers exactly what you measured for instead of what you wanted.
Efficiency is a constraint worth respecting. It is not an objective worth chasing. When you optimize a constraint instead of the outcome, you build something fast that solves the wrong problem. Before asking how to do something efficiently, ask what you are actually trying to accomplish. That is utility-first design.
I did not find the edge of the world because we planned well. I found it because we left room for it to exist.