I have always struggled to be professional in design, as I see it as my personal journey. This lack of differentiation in who I am as a designer versus who I am as a person makes it very difficult at times to develop my professional skills. As a personal designer, I treat design as a passion therefore especially in the first years of my study, I struggled a lot.
One area I had to improve dearly was time management, and while I can’t state that I have completely solved the issue, I have improved a lot on it.
To fix these problems, I ended up taking more initiative within group projects in managing the time and progress we are making in the allocated time and have also buit myself a logging system.
I still face day to day challenges of being attention deficit but especially after starting my own business, as I now was responsible to both me and other stakeholders who were relying on my services, I acquired my biggest ever leap in these practical skills.
One skill that I have been strong with ever since I started this project was honesty and self-reflection. My main policy towards everything in life is staying true to myself and the ones around me and this skill has allowed me to take criticism well and reflect accordingly to improve my path and my approaches to both design and business.
Within un-Compliant mechanisms, the whole concept came up with me failing my previous final project and realizing that i have grown to an episode of my life that my actions have actual tangible consequences. And building my entire graduation project around this spiritual journey has allowed me to self reflect quite a lot. I drew quite a lot of timelines to myself during this project in order to draw conclusions from the mistakes I made in the past. One very specific action was to remind myself that I was going onto a tangent and I had to re-adjust my direction to not get overwhelmed.
I think growing up is simply learning how to live with yourself and in my design/research process, this is exactly what i did in this past year.
In the future, I plan to stick to my sincerity and truth values as closely as I can, while still improving my lacking professionalism in environments such as time management on my own.
