Where What are the GOOD ideas?

I think there is a sense in school that ideas can be left on the floor. As in, lost on the cutting room floor. There are so many good ideas that come from a school environment, where all you have to do is think of the idea. But when you have to come up with an idea every week, every month, every class, there are so many pearls, seeds of good ideas which could really ride with more work. Most, if not all of these, get a pic taken, and are set in the pile of old foam/ideas.

I'm in Seattle now, and I have the luxury of working in the Koolhaas library. There is a sense of completion which I think a designer of any kind should be proud of. Standing in the wings of this stage, I know what it takes to make a simple light, and can appreciate even more, what it takes to make something, anything of interest. I think Seattle made a really good choice to build this, its been full every time I have been here, there is always room, and it's always interesting to work in.

But how does a student decide which ideas are good enough to revisit? Does she gage the amount of interest in the studio? Does he listen to his peers? Perhaps he simply "believes." I think it has become obscenely clear that the ideas we work with in the studio are a long way from anything that can be made. What is the level of preparation which pratt should work to explain to the students? I think in some ways the program has dug itself into a hole because it has a very wide set of exit parameters. I.e. people from Pratt find themselves doing all sorts of things for work. Small furniture, Smart Design, design consultancies out on Long Island, automotive... It would be so easy to shave the program down to only a couple outlets, and focus on those things. I do not advocate that. The thing that keeps me going back to the studio, day after day, is to listen to friends who have very similar interests.

Furthermore, I think that any sort of tracking will kill the "liberal arts" style of education that Pratt ID seems to have adapted. But that leaves us in the same place, where people who come out of school are not really prepared to come out and just start producing objects, which seems like it should be the most basic of operations for a recently grad with a MA in design. Maybe I have it wrong, maybe being able to produce nice things in limited quantities is the pinnacle of the design world, the piece de resistance. Even then, why do I not feel ready to produce the things I want to make?

Ok, but back to the original question. How do you identify good ideas? is there a strategy for this? Is this something that people have been thinking about for a long time? I guess I could read about this for endless nights, and maybe at the end I will be smarter. Can we learn to identify only the good ideas in a forest of all sorts of ideas?