Design Futures and Professional Practice

Design studies for third year has started and we've been given our first assignment. This year in design studies we are working with other disciplines in our year. We've been put into groups of 8, with people from each discipline; Graphics, Jewellery, Product, Textiles, IED, IMD.

I liked the idea of working with different groups, helping us to get know more people and putting us out of our comfort zones.

Working together we each had to pick a subject from the list we were given. Then research our subject and create a wikipedia entry for the university site. Our group decided to meet up and discuss each topic we wished to pick. Luckily we all chose separate subjects which were Overshooting population & design, Branding & design, Up cycling down cycling / recycling & design, Mass production & design, Resource depletion & design and Fair trade & design.

I decided to choose population overshoot and design because I studied this in Higher geography which I really enjoyed studying so I am looking forward to delving back into this. It also isn't really to do with my discipline so I think I'll find is refreshing to do something really different but still relating to design.

As a group we decided to brainstorm and do a mini mind-map of each of our topics. By doing this we realised we all had different inputs relating to our specialised disciplines. This helped us to look into different aspects which we never may have thought of. It made me see that it was a good idea to mix up the disciplines and have us working together.