I was really fascinated by the talk that Joe Hallock and his colleagues from Microsoft gave about the UX/Product Design field. I had a little bit of knowledge about product design before coming to SCCA, but now that we are in the swing of things with our classes, on top of this most recent guest speaker, I feel like I’m starting to really get a sense of what it actually is, and consequently my desires around what subdomain of design I want to land in may be gravitating towards it.
Of course, it’s still to early to know for sure. But I think about the Japanese concept of Ikigai in the discovery process. The relevant part of the concept for me is the thinking around the overlap between that which I am good at and that which I enjoy. Both of these dimensions are something that I am still constantly in the process of uncovering. My 20s have been a minefield of careers that I fled from, so I’m hoping that this time around, I will be able to chart my initial course as a designer with more wisdom.
I used the diagram that Joe explained to us to brainstorm some of the possible design fields I could work in. The yellow notes on the chart below represent the fields that I already had an interest in before this program started. The blue notes represent the fields that I am curious to know more about, that I filled in just on my own, after starting this exercise.
Figma Link for the above diagram
Doing this exercise with myself was interesting, and informative. I noticed that many of the interests I had coming in were in the “Hi Info, Specific Audience” quadrant. I think this makes a lot of sense. Historically, those kinds of tasks have called to me. I really enjoy the process of disambiguating complicated systems and making them simple. In past jobs I’ve had, this has rarely been offered to me, but when it had been, I enjoyed those activities a lot. I think this is a clue to continue in this direction, because those kinds of domains are already aligned with both my “what I can do well” and “what I enjoy doing”, from the Ikigai way of thinking.
However, I am interested in exploring more of the opposite quadrant: the “low info, broad audience” sector. I think I don’t have many incoming preferences for these types of domains because I really just don’t have any experience with them. But now that I’ve been inspired to think about them, I find myself intrigued. I think it could be really fun and fulfilling to work on, for example, huge graphics for a big interior space. Or maybe, an app or a technology that has one simple purpose and has to reach a huge number of people.
At this point, I’m still learning so much, both about the field of design and about my own interests. But the clues are there, and I resolve to investigate them further.