Creative futures - Design and the market

After today’s lecture from Mike Press it got me thinking about the question he asked ‘With a degree in design what jobs can you do?’ The first six things I thought of were:

Interior designer

Interior architect

Furniture designer

Exhibition designer

Installation designer

Model maker

Mikes answer to the question was ‘You can do mostly anything!’ It got me thinking about my future and how it could shape up to look like, I could end up doing something that I would never have thought about in the past. To make my future turn out the best way possible I need to be independent (which I think I already am quite independent), to do so you have to keep going even if it fails first time - try again and again. Be flexible, passionate, distinctive, have a feel for the market, make work fun, don’t aim too high, keep business lean, have a partner (if having one) as committed as you and be ready to split from this partner. This has definitely gave me food for thought on how I will look at and take control over my own work that I will complete in the future. 

The second part of Mike’s lecture was on ‘Making presentations work’, although I have already had to complete a number of presentations it was great to hear his perspective on how to make them run perfectly. 

The main two things I found that he drilled in/emphasised the most were preparation and rehearsal, when listening to the things he was saying about these topics it was basically common sense. He made the clear point of saying about the presentation slides ’It is not the message nor the messenger’ and that it is only there to support the message you are talking about. 

I would not have thought that a lecture about how to create a good presentation could be as fun and interesting as Mike Press made it. I was sad to hear that this was his last lecture that he would be giving this semester - all of his lectures have been exciting and kept me focused on the topic he was talking about, hopefully the lectures to follow will do the same!