{"id":1548,"date":"2013-10-20T17:45:49","date_gmt":"2013-10-20T17:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=1548"},"modified":"2013-12-20T15:50:03","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T15:50:03","slug":"pour-boxer-il-faut-avoir-faim-my-thoughts-on-design-for-design-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/pour-boxer-il-faut-avoir-faim-my-thoughts-on-design-for-design-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Pour boxer, il faut avoir faim: my thoughts on design for design students"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written for an exhibition put on by Middlesex University as part of London Design Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I graduated from a McSc in Industrial Design 2004 and here\u2019s what I wish they\u2019d told me.<\/p>\n

You won\u2019t design this way ever again. <\/strong>
\nIf you work for someone else, you will spend 100% of your time designing 10% of a product. In famous design studios, you will only get involved in a fraction of the whole process, either the artistic direction, or the CAD drawings, or the user interface or tiny snippets of each. You\u2019ll spend half your days in meetings and wonder \u201cwow, I used to be so productive before\u201d.<\/p>\n

But working for yourself doesn\u2019t make it easier. <\/strong>
\nIf you work for yourself you\u2019ll spend 10% of your time designing 100% of the product and 90% of your time selling it, begging for money or filling in paperwork. You\u2019re probably never going to pay off your student loans this way, but you might be happier. I am.<\/p>\n

Keep Learning. <\/strong>
\nIn the digital age, to be a product designer is something you have to justify to yourself and others. It\u2019s not a popular field of practice anymore as we live in more and more digital worlds and we\u2019re moving towards a society of access & rental models rather than ownership. I learnt how to code in my MA because I hung out with programmers and I can safely say it saved me. It gave me an edge and an understanding of a field I would always have to interact with. I work in the fuzzy world between products & the internet (called the internet of things) and I can safely say what I learnt between 2000-2004 is obsolete, but that\u2019s ok because I continued to learn and develop my skills.<\/p>\n

Fame is never fortune. <\/strong>
\nThe greatest disappointment of your early years in design is to realise that when you make the pages of a magazine, blog, newspaper, or show your work in a museum your life doesn\u2019t change. You are fodder for some poor journalist\/curator who has a 4 o\u2019clock deadline. That\u2019s it. Never pays the bills, never increases sales. Never.<\/p>\n

Just do. <\/strong>
\nThe Internet has created a society where we\u2019re constantly fixating on what other people are doing. Back in the days, you might meet your peers once a week or a month, not every second of the day, which left plenty of time for the doing bit of design. It can be easy to stay stuck in a mode where you\u2019re just spending your time in research and not actually designing. Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, the distractions are enormous, but nothing trumps just doing, designing, working.<\/p>\n

Meet non-designers. <\/strong>
\nSpending time with people who aren\u2019t designers is really important. There\u2019s nothing worse for your career of developing a closed sense of what you\u2019re interested in and what you\u2019re not. You don\u2019t know what you might be interested in\u2026that\u2019s the point of life in design. Inspiration can come from anywhere, so you literally have to go to random events, meet scientists, talk to politicians, because you might find you have something to contribute in their field too.<\/p>\n

We have enough chairs, but not enough wheelchairs. <\/strong>
\nDesign should be about empathising with a foreign problem and trying to solve it, not doing the same thing over and over again. I go around the Milan Furniture Fair and I despair at the number of pointless additions to the built environment young designers are producing when our grandmothers are being sold ugly products that are hard to use. Dare to work on un-popular topics because you\u2019ll find you become an expert and you\u2019ll make a great career out of it. It takes courage and if design isn\u2019t about courage, then we should all have become accountants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written for an exhibition put on by Middlesex University as part of London Design Festival. I graduated from a McSc in Industrial Design 2004 and here\u2019s what I wish they\u2019d told me. You won\u2019t design this way ever again. If you work for someone else, you will spend 100% of your time designing 10% of… Continue reading Pour boxer, il faut avoir faim: my thoughts on design for design students<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-product-design","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-oY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1548"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1626,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions\/1626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}