In July I returned to study as a foundation student of RMIT’s Master of Design Futures. When I completed my Commerce Degree 13 years ago I would not have expected to ever find myself in a design course, but then again back in 2002 l was not alone in percieving design as the domain of a “priesthood in black turtlenecks and designer glasses”, as Tim Brown once put it. In the last decade design’s ability to inform and enrich both thinking and executing business and social endeavours has become more widely understood. As a long time Product Manager in the ICT sector l had been looking for ways of creating better service-based products and had begun exploring the field of Service Design. This in turn lead me to the Master of Design Futures. Returning again tostudy has been an interesting challenge to both my ways of thinking and ways of working.
Ways of Thinking.
The first real challenge to my previous way of thinking came through re-aquatinting myself with Academic papers. After so many years working in the corporate environment where the focus is on very succinctly communicating they key facts, it was initially challenging to dive back in to academic writing with its own metalanguage and deep explanation of issues to build a detailed conclusion. Whilst this was unfamiliar it was also a reminder of what had brought me back to study in the first place, a desire to enquire more deeply into a specific problem and build arobust understanding of it.
The second challenge to my thinking came at a much more significant way through our first task: to discuss our current design practice. Coming from corporate roles, I had only really considered my profession and not really nurtured an appreciation of my own practice. I think this is not an uncommon perspective in the corporate world. Whilst having to pull together a description ofmy practice forced me into an uncomfortably new perspective, thisshift in mindset was critical to unlocking my appreciation for the ways in which both a design mindset as well as a toolset have been an integral part of the way I practice my profession.
Ways of Working.
Many things have changed since I was last a student, and the change was compounded by the fact that I am now studying in a new field. All this presented me with the challenge of new tools, including video presentations, blogging, sketch noting and graphic presentation. In this reguad I found the learning curve to be at times frustrating and one or couple of occasions completely confounding. The challenge of hairing to master new tools at the same time as coming back into long set aside ways of thinking proved to be particularly tune consuming. If I had mytime over, I would definitely set aside more time to master new tools of the trade.
One of the most interesting new ways ofworking that I encountered was the online nature of the course . Whilst I’d done short courses online previously, these were always individual learning tasks so this course is the first time I’ve found myself interacting with classmates in an online forum. Through this process tue become particularly aware of my usual interpersonal communication style – I often talk through an idea to reach my understanding of it and thus process involves drawingout concepts. Working’man idea toreach my understanding of it and thus process involves drawing out concepts. Working in G+ to discuss weekly readings and tasks l found myself re-editing posts over and over as I resolved an idea, forgoing engaging my classmates. in the thought process. Similarly Inoticed that many classmates were also posting resolved’ ideas and I seemed to be missing out on thin earlier sense-making processes. This was one area where I really Saw a lost opportunity as there is so much gold in bouncing ideas off other people that an unlock entirely new insights.
Some Concluding Thoughts.
The first subject in the Master of Design Futures wasa great entrée into emerging fields of design. By providing several different fields of design, including Design Thinking, Design Critique and Design Strategy and challenging students to situate our own practice within them, this subject provided a valuable foundation for further study in the field.
This post was generated as part of RMIT University’s Masters of Design Futures program, you can find out more at http://designfuture.me/
Lisa blogs here 