*It's pretty good stuff. Lots of home truths here. Like meeting your mother-in-law, and she tells you that any successful marriage is ten percent romance and ninety percent budgets, housework and child-rearing.
"I graduated from a McSc in Industrial Design 2004 and here’s what I wish they’d told me.
"You won't design this way ever again.
"If 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'll spend half your days in meetings and wonder "wow, I used to be so productive before".
"But working for yourself doesn't make it easier.
"If you work for yourself you'll 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're probably never going to pay off your student loans this way, but you might be happier. I am.
"Keep Learning.
"In the digital age, to be a product designer is something you have to justify to yourself and others. It's not a popular field of practice anymore as we live in more and more digital worlds and we’re 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between products & the internet (called the internet of things) and I can safely say what I learnt between 2000-2004 is obsolete, but that's ok because I continued to learn and develop my skills.
"Fame is never fortune.
"The 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't change. You are fodder for some poor journalist/curator who has a 4 o'clock deadline. That’s it. Never pays the bills, never increases sales. Never...." (((I bet Alexandra could tell you that getting blogged doesn't help much, either.)))
