This week’s post is inspired by Joe Hallock and his colleagues from Microsoft who spoke specifically about designing at Microsoft and more generally about work as a designer in the corporate world, comparing his experience at giant Microsoft to other experiences that might be found at smaller organizations. He also shared a useful graphic for understanding design projects in terms of their information density compared to the specificity of the target audience. The audience for a project can range from very broad to very specific, and at any point along that range, information density can vary from low to high. For me at this time, it’s a bit hard to answer the question of where along these spectrums I’d like to work in the future because I’m open to many different possibilities, although I have to admit that Joe Hallock made Microsoft sound much more appealing than I’d thought previously. I suppose to pin it down, I have to say that I’m into the idea of balance. I think an ideal position upon graduation might be with a small team in a large corporation because I’m interested in the stability and opportunities for growth that a large corporation can offer as well as the resume-building effect of having experience with a well-known employer whose design work is strong. I hope to find myself in a position where I’m able to find mentorship and build my portfolio while establishing good habits as a solid foundation for future work. It’s also important to me to find a work environment that’s supportive of women’s voices and is flexible enough that I can support my family and have creative space on my off-time for passion projects. I think that there are some large to medium employers out there who fit these criteria pretty well while other large employers (stereotypically Amazon) have expectations that “successful” employees will have lives that revolve only around their work. In terms of information density and specific audiences, I think I have the most experience with projects that are fairly high on the scale of information density; some of my past studies and work have included museum education and zoological or botanical illustrations. Through that work, I’ve developed a strength in making complicated information understandable for a non-expert audience, and I’m definitely interested in exploring work that would involve interactive data visualizations. This would fall into the quadrant of high density but broad audience. I’ve also learned recently a little bit about UX work that’s intended to solve design problems in high-risk scenarios; one example is design work that was done at Children’s Hospital looking at how surgical tools and operating room equipment is organized in order to streamline and improve outcomes for patients. This was really inspirational because the designers were able to implement changes that quite significantly lowered the amount of life-threatening emergencies for children during surgical procedures even though they themselves weren’t surgeons or medical professionals. While the actual designed elements themselves didn’t contain a high information density, the designers dealt with very high density information in order to arrive at the solution, and it was for a very specialized audience: the surgeons. I’m really interested in exploring how UX design could be used in ways like this to improve lives and the human condition, but I think that the designs that actually come out of that type of work could wildly vary in terms of audience specificity as well as information density. Finally, I really love some of the more tangible aspects of design like drawing illustrations on paper with different media, and I hope that my future career will allow for a component of hands-on image rendering; I think that could also be something that happens at a company of any size and for any audience from broad to specific.