I have been helping on a build team for a polargraph drawing bot my hackerspace has been building for a local festival called Dogwood Arts Festival. A local science and arts museum for children called The MUSE were our cohorts. Our build team has had instructions but have had to experiment with our own solutions. Some of this has involved following instructions like how to get Processing to work, some of the process has involved troubleshooting ourselves, but some of the process has involved unique solutions from plain old tinkering. We've been on a time crunch and resolved to limit ourselves to the structure on critical items, but I still noticed some similarities in how we worked through the build and the creative learning spiral. For us, the structure was not inappropriate for this purpose. While this was a learning experience, we had a specific goal in mind that we wanted to achieve by a certain date.
Here's what we have ended up with:
We ran with this tute and a variety of SCAD files if you want to try your own version:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Polargraph-Drawing-Machine/
(not sure if this is the best place for this or not)