Careers Advice Session

I decided that I would feel more comfortable at the end of University if I was given some personal careers advice. We are given a little general information through some lectures but I feel that it's not always relevant to me so it would be a good idea to have a 1 on 1 session with the careers advisor.
My concerns was that graphic design wasn't my ideal job and I would personally like to work in the games industry. We talked about my strengths and weaknesses and my likes and dislikes. The careers advisor agreed that my strengths and skills would benefit me well in the games industry and gave me some information on how to find a job within it. This made me feel a lot more confident and gave me a more positive outlook on leaving University. She advised that I make another appointment and bring a CV so we could work on it together to make it attractive to employers in the industry I'm interested in. I am definitely pleased with the outcome of the session.

Design Change Symposium

A Design Change Symposium was held at the University today. Many guest lecturers were invited and gave talks about design, many to do with the topic of sustainability.

John Thackara - Director of Design of The Times
The first lecturer was John Thackara from DOTT 07. John Thackara has really interesting ideas about design and it's place in society. His work is about finding places in society that design can improve. Some of his projects include the dash (design and sexual health) project and Alzheimer100. They also have various discussions about other problems in society and explore how they can be fixed. I find this design company very interesting because it is actively searching out problems and solutions as opposed to clients setting them. I think it is important for a design company to have its own personality, values and opinions on what need to be changed in society and it is especially important to keep discussing them.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville was the next lecturer and continues the theme of having personal values. A lot of her work involved getting personal, especially her work "Biddy Mason's Place: A Passage of Time". This work was a celebration of Los Angeles society and what it is made from. It explores one person's lifetime and their place in the society. It is very powerful because it is displayed as a mural out in public. Her work seems to stem from her personal views of what she thinks society needs to see. For example, she set up The Woman’s Building, a center to display work about what it means to be female. However, although focusing on very personal project, she was very interested in opening her work up to the community, to the point where she suggests that if you are making a piece of work for society, let help society make it. To me this makes complete sense.

Rupert Basset
The next lecturer stepped away from talking about personal work and values and gave a more serious talk on sustainability. He has come up with some image mapping to aid designers balance sustainability during a project. The 4 main points he stresses that need to be juggled are Financial, Social, Personal and Environmental. He raised a few good points but I feel that from the other lecturers, I feel that a stronger ethic for sustainability will be reached if the design company has it's sustainability principles based at its roots. However, it doesn't hurt to be reminded what exactly you need to be balancing to have sustainable practices.

Karen Blincoe
The series of lectures took a turn back to more personal reasons for being sustainable again with Karen Blincoe as the next lecturer. It was apparent almost immediately how Karen felt so passionately about sustainability and the ways it needs to fit in with modern day companies. She takes a very holistic few towards the topic and encourages others to do the same. Personally, I feel that some of her views are a little idealistic. You can't just suddenly change all of the industry into being 100% green and sustainable. I feel it is important to be looking at components of companies to see how they can be made more sustainable. However, if it is possible to look at the roots of the companies and find methods of making the company more interested in sustainability there, this would be ideal.
Her ideas are highly passionate, often to the point of being slightly aggressive. You can tell that she really wants to change the industry. I feel that although her ideas can seem slightly idealistic, it is important that there are designers like her really fighting for this issue to be looked at.

Mervyn Kurlansky
Mervyn Kurlansky has a lot of the same opinions that the preceding lecturers did. However, his personal interest was in fighting consumerism. Whereas this is a bit of a complicated issue to get into, a lot of his other ideas are very interesting. He suggests that we should be fighting the standard model of businesses success being gauged on how much money it makes. I feel this is true and the real measure of a business's success is how true it is remaining to its values whilst making enough money for the business to grow and its values to spread.

Conclusion
In all, the guest lecturers at the symposium are incredibly interesting people. They all have very passionate beliefs on what it means to be practitioning sustainable design. I have taken a lot away from this. I feel that personally, it is important to be encouraging sustainable design but at the same time you can not expect to grow a business this way. Employers will always be looking to spend lowest to make the most money so using sustainable materials will not often appeal to them. However, it is important, where possible, to encourage businesses to use more sustainable methods. It would be wrong to just stay silent on the issue and not even try to persuade a client to give a thought to sustainability. I think it is also important for a design company to decide on its opinion towards this topic as designers are often setting the trends that will become popular in the future.

Personal Exhibition - Organisation

We now have official dates for the exhibition, the 16th and 17th of March, with us setting up on the evening of the 15th.
With this in mind, we decided to make a list of all the equipment we needed. We were a little concerned about leaving the equipment overnight and looked into getting insurance. However, we were unsuccessful with any companies we contacted as they were not able to provide cover for a few days, at a student rate, at a property that wasn't either academic or residential. After investigating into the security of the Somer Center, where it is being held, we discovered that there would be people sleeping in the center guarding all the work. For this reason, we decided that insurance was not necessary.

Personal Exhibition - Advertisement

In return for being given some space at the lecture, we wanted to advertise the fair at the University. I felt that this was important as an act of goodwill but it would also give a good impression. I volunteered to make the poster. It had to be simple, easy to read and designed for grey scale printing.