GIVE DESIGN A CHANCE

Hi!

Well, it’s always hard to know if something is for you when you haven’t tried it yet, and that’s the problem with many students for choosing a career.

I think there are two key factors on this: 

1. You have to like it.

2. Your teachers have to like it.

I can’t talk as brilliantly as I’d like about my teachers because only two of them were industrial designers… others were architects, physicists, engineers and so on. So, there wasn’t a real “design culture” in the school. But at the end, and because I liked it, I took books and mags by myself, assisted to some talks and of course searched on internet for knowing about what they didn’t show me. If you don’t like it and in the school don’t try to make you like it, it’s a dead end.

For me it’s a beautiful career because you don’t learn any “specific” subject but a bit of everything. They won’t show how to make that or this type of product because there are thousand of different products and it would be impossible, but they’ll show you how to proceed to get a good result whatever the product is: methodology.

So, you’ll learn about the problem you need to solve with your product, the “needs” of the people a product is oriented for, how to search for good concepts that can attend those needs or solve those problems that people have, take notice of the limitations imposed by manufacturing process and in the end creating a good solution to that problem (because there is not only one good solution). And in many ways, this is a team work.

Industrial Design is a bit like knowing how to solve day-a-day problems. You need knowledge and creativity and in the school they’ll give you the first and will teach you to boost the second. But everything else is up for you and that’s what I find really interesting.

PS: If you have any more specific questions, ask me!