Current Identity

Who I am as a Designer

I position myself as a designer focused on exploring materials and documenting my findings in self-made and open-source systems. Whether that will take me to the side of CMF or Sustainability is something I am actively figuring out through courses like Design for Post-Growth Living or my internship plans for year 3. I like designing using my intuition as a design professional and previous experiences, but also like to use more rigorous methods connecting to design research and human-centered design practices like co-creation and speculation, or what I did for my Project-3. I notice I love figuring out things I don't necessarily have a grasp on yet, and using my creativity to enhance projects or designs, especially when they are multi-modal and highly physical. Design probes, diary studies and placing myself in certain settings using materials, objects, pictures and scenarios as a designer is what I love doing and can contribute a lot about in a project.

Strengths

• More experience with unfamiliar advanced materials in open-ended scenarios where exploration is valued.
• Communicate and easily connect with people in certain fields of interest regarding projects.
• Designing using intuition and creativity to explore and speculate.
• Visual communication through high quality photography and highly visual pictorials.
• Ability to put everything in words and look at the bigger picture of a project.
• Focused on documentation and documentation-related systems within a project.

Challenges

• Tendency to take on too much responsibility in group settings.
• Balancing depth of exploration with time constraints.
• Setting unnecessary limitations and rules/systems on myself in the opening phase of projects instead of openly exploring and documenting as I go.
• Pondering on perfectionism too long instead of exploring.

Future Professional Development

For the future of my professional identity development, I want to focus more on the following topics:

• Become even more comfortable as a designer handling abstract and long material explorations without panic or burnout through more experience and adhering to structural parts like research questions, theories and methods, which I learned through feedback on Project-3 and Design <> Research.
• I also want to become more deliberate in moments of leadership rather than becoming a leader purely by most involvement with the project. I am good at helping members of my teams discover how to contribute and become vital to the project, this shouldn't turn into me telling people what to do.
• I want to learn how to strike a balance between my systematic designing tendencies and free/creative designing based on intuition and feeling. I feel that this will come with more experience and critical reviewing on projects, which PDP 2.2 and Project-3 are helping me with.

Read further -> Past & Present.