My Design Journey

My own design career is only just beginning.

What does it mean to be a designer? This is a question I’m beginning to ask myself ever since my enrolment to this design degree.

I had previously studied fashion design in high school, this followed technological development, prototyping and implementation. However, making garments never really taught me anything about design itself, aside from the fact it can be an extremely lengthy process. This left me unsatisfied. I felt my experiences of design had been too shallow and I wanted to redevelop and rediscover my aspirations. So, I want to talk about what is design, how it applies to me and what type of designer I’d like to be in the future.

Designs from 2018

Design can be seen as communicating ideas, generating ideas and evaluating them. This can be something everyone can do while problem-solving things in their daily lives. Take decorating your home for example; you’re doing interior design. With my own experience, design on a professional stage can have various impacts on a person, company or society as a whole. To achieve this, designers often go in-depth to understand their target audience and stakeholders through fundamental empathy skills like divergent and convergent thinking (Ko A.) - in which I discover the significance of empathy. In addition to this, it fascinates me how design is a such a framework for innovation once tied in with empathy. This makes me think that being a designer means to make a meaningful impact on a person, a society or the world.

In saying that, empathy and experience are my keywords and that makes me interested in aiming to become a User Experience Designer. A UX designer encompasses an entirely user-centred approach journey and its processes can include creating personas, designing wireframes and interactive prototypes and testing (I.D.F.). This sort of user-centred design discipline appeals to me because of my desire to widen the views on my understanding of people. With an understanding, it makes me wonder what sort of design solutions would be unravelled whilst ensuing the limitations of user requirements and context of uses? Now that’s a meaningful journey to walk towards.

Now, I’ve still got a lot more to learn about designing professionally and who knows what I will end up becoming? All that there is to do is keep moving forward with a goal, gain the skills I need to gain and make a change to what I can. And what that - being a designer - means might be different depending on what type of design discipline I end up being.

Readings:

Ko A. J. with contributions from Rachel Franz - What designers do

Interaction Design Foundation. What is User Experience (UX) Design?