Caution: Designers at work

This week saw us on two back to back zoom calls with designers in the professional world. Those two designers were Norman Stevenson and Noel Joyce.

Norman Stevenson is a Senior Design Consultant with over twelve years professional experience creating appealing, innovative and brand-centric products for global clients in the consumer, communications, industrial and healthcare sectors.

Noel Joyce is an Industrial Designer, Entrepreneur and currently Head of Design at Hax, the world's first and largest Hardware Accelerator. He is a specialist in collaborative, multidisciplinary and holistic approaches to new product and business development with emphasis on entrepreneurial and design basis.

Having the opportunity to listen in on their stories of how they got to be where they are and what they do on a daily basis was pretty reassuring. When people ask me where I hope to go after my degree I don’t really know how to answer that question. I often say I can go anywhere but that draws a question of like where or doing what?

I let myself down when I have to answer that because I don’t normally think about it, and having listened to both of these people talk I now know two completely different ways that I could go.

Listening to Noel was a little difficult because of the zoom call and technology not working for us the way we want it to. Although what I did hear and take in was very interesting. He talked a lot about working with various start up businesses and some of the projects he has worked on for himself. The one that stood out to me most was what I guess you could call a social action project. He managed to get a county council to fix a footpath that had fallen heavily into disrepair. This was a thing that was affecting him on a daily basis and he did something about it. He figure out what the council would need to hear in order for them to have no other option but to do something about it.

The takeaway from my butchered rendition of that story is that, we as designers should be trying to communicate in whatever language the client/ consumer we are working with speaks in. That can be literally a different language or it can be speaking to them in a way that motivates, or in terms that they relate to rather than a bunch of technical jargon.

Norman Stevenson

Norman’s talk was more philosophical and he gave the class a seven and a half contradictions as the advice

he would give to a younger self, or in this case us. I will list them so you can see them for yourself but his main point throughout the talk was that we should be thinking about who we want to be as designers.

What are our responsibilities as a designer? How are we going to fit into the world of design now? Baring that question in mind we were asked to pick a piece of design that we wish we had done.

My answers to those questions, well they are not exactly straight forward and clear cut for me as they might be for some, at least in my head.

If you want learn of my answer to the above questions, find the next blog, they will be in there.