What I’m really learning from my Rose Scholar excursions off campus is that there really is a world beyond Cornell, though sometimes it doesn’t feel like it during the heat of prelims and finals.

I had never been to the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival before. I had heard people talk about it but I never thought it was as worthwhile as they described it to be. Especially since it’s just apples.

The world of apple growing is far more complex than I had imagined it to be. Farmers breed apples in order to achieve certain textures, colors, and taste. In fact, farmers even have patents on the apples they grow! There is a lot of business savviness involved in apple growing. Farmers with patents actually pick who they want to grow their apples. It’s basically to achieve quality control. They’re trying to protect their crop to ensure that other farmers who grow it will treat it with the same respect as they do.

At the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival, apple cider donuts are really popular! There are numerous varieties of them! Some donuts are big, some are small, some are drenched in frosting, some are lightly dusted with sugar. That showed me one basic thing about life. Just because something is done one way doesn’t mean that is the only way to do it. In fact, that’s how innovation occurs! This is an idea you see in tech a lot. For example, telephones. People kept making changes to something that already existed, which gave us our modern day smart phone. Thus, to create something you don’t have to create something brand new or novel. Rather, you can take an existing design and have it somehow solve your own need.

The variety of apple cider donuts got me thinking about a concept in User Experience Design in tech, in which you design for an audience that has specific needs. In this case, we’re talking about an audience with specific needs from donuts. The bakers at the festival were thinking about this idea when they came up with their recipe. They were thinking about whether or not their customer likes frosting and how much cinnamon they like. It’s trivial seeming things that can totally alter the customer’s experience.

So, my take away from the Ithaca Apple Harvest festival is that there is no one correct way to do things. Rather, allow your creativity to take charge and you can create something even better than the original!