This week was consultation week with our guest tutor and design thinking specialist Dr. Philip Whiting. He started the session with a very engaging exercise in approaching a problem in a holistic manner. He identified a specific task (how do you teach someone how to use a mobile phone?) and proceeded to ask everyone’s suggestions and opinions about it.
The result was an extensive list of actions and items (more than 60) which were then classified further based on three criteria:
Critical
Important
Good to Know.
By the end of the exercise, we classified each of the 60+ items into the three criteria based on a consensus. The exercise was to show how a task or challenge was be viewed holistically by taking into consideration a myriad of diverse perspectives. It was definitely an exhaustive and tedious process, one that could possibly go awry without proper focus or careful planning but the value of the information that was obtained was truly relevant and comprehensive.
Dr. Whiting also gave us another exercise using this holistic understanding technique.
Here's what I came up with:
Project Overview:
International student job seekers, specifically those who want to pursue a career in design, are having a difficult time getting hired for design jobs in Australia. How can they use self-branding as an employment strategy?
My outcome would be a set of guidelines that designers can use to begin building their own unique set of branding assets. The guidelines will be created based on user (local designers) feed back as well as on current design trends in the market today.
Feedback/understanding 01:
How do you justify individual difference and how far are the employers interested in self branded designers?
Feedback/understanding 02:
Branding is not really that crucial especially if you are still unsure of your own brand identity. It's really hard to brand yourself even when you've been doing it for sometime now. How will you project help address this challenge of self-branding?
Feedback/understanding 03:
When you say 'international student job seekers' do you mean just those in the design industry or does it include all other industries as well? Shouldn't you just make it broad and say non-local designers instead?
Based on the comments I received from my classmates, I felt that I needed to tweak my statement a little bit and focus on a broader target market. Maybe it would be better to have the target as new designers as well as non-local ones like myself (I'm not a new designer but I've never worked as one in Australia yet) and not limit the focus on just international students. I also need to investigate if branding was indeed essential to local graphic designers because based on my experience as a designer back in Manila, it played a huge part in getting hired and noticed in the industry.
In order to understand the work culture and employment landscape of Australia, particularly of Brisbane, I needed to do some primary (interviews) and secondary research. I also needed to do some research on how self-branding can potentially give designers an edge in getting jobs.
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