When I grow up

When I grow up, I don’t know what or who I will become. I want to be lots of things. I know that I want to be a designer of some sort, and that I want to make a contribution to the time line of design. As we have explored during the semester, there is no one time line to the history of design. Any one history or time line for industrial design would leave out too much. So the question is, when I grow up, how I will approach the issues in the world; will I be a “green designer”, a “humanitarian designer”, or … it’s an endless list really…

Throughout our lectures, I have been trying to analyze and question how I feel about the topics we have been exposed to. And in the end, find out where I fit in to this extensive interdisciplinary of design. At first, it was kind of a struggle because the more I explored deeper into the areas in design, the more confused I got. I guess I had never really questioned where I stood as a designer and why I wanted to do what I wanted to do. And as soon as we started writing these short essays, the small organized pile of knowledge on design in my mind turned into an ever-expanding chaos. It’s like Gödel’s Paradox: “All systems are either complete but inconsistent, or consistent but incomplete.”

At first, for me design was solving problems and it had to be meant for a specified user group. Throughout the lectures and my responses I realized that there were so many things that we had to keep in mind during a design process. It didn’t end with just solving problems. It was so much beyond that. Looking at my blogs, my classmates’ blogs and our discussions in class I realized that people had different perspectives about designs. This meant that it wasn’t only about function; design is also focused on how people approach it. People don’t only use these designs; they think about the designs and interpret them in their own ways. This means that design should not only bring solutions to problems and be functional but go further and evoke emotions in people and make them think. Because people are not robots, they have minds and emotions. And this is where the chaos in my mind started to organize itself.

My sudden realization was that I wanted to contribute to help solve the issues of the world but my approach would be just like the Campana Brother’s described, for me “design is to bring emotions, bring fun and bring joy to people”. As I compiled all the explorations I made in my blogs, I combined what I liked about each topic and came up with where I stand in the field of ID. Now, I feel comfortable and enlightened about my approach on design and where I want to go from here. I am ready to grow up more…