Professional Worries Session 26.10.18

6D2  

This session was about discussing our fears and worries about entering the graphic design industry and how these might be solved creatively. Initially we had to write down personal concerns about the industry, some of mine included:

• Sending out many emails without reply.
• Not having job security.
• Work not being at a professional enough standard.
• Not finding the opportunities in the place I want to live. 
• Not earning enough to sustain living - the doing what you love or paying the bills dilemma. 

Doing this allowed me to organise my thoughts and think about each one with scrutiny. Each one is fairly rational but can be avoided by perseverance and compromise.

We were then asked to focus on the most prevalent worry and write about it for the group to analyse. We then traveled round in a circle annotating this worry, with similar concerns or advice for the future. It was interesting to see people's ideas and perspectives which I hadn't really considered before. Mine was 'wanting a creative job but living in a place that doesn't have many available. Then having to become an art teacher.' The most interesting piece of advice I got was that becoming a teacher doesn't mean having to give up your practice. In many ways the two can be balanced hand in hand.

We then developed the most common worry within the group, discussing potential ideas and solutions surrounding it. Ours was the fear that lack of skills and experience could effect our employability. Some of the solutions we came up with were to continue to practice design skills in our own time and take chances and put ourselves into situations where we will be pushed but to our best ability, i.e. a bird being pushed out of the nest.

We then discussed how we could make a podcast that encourages people to push themselves to try new things within design. These could be short creative challenges like 'make a picture out of the resources on your desk' or 'do a digital drawing only using the colour orange'.

After that we produced a tweet mission statement for the #pushyourself podcast.
'Tune into our new, weekly podcast. New creative challenge each week. Break the boundries of design. Spread your wings and learn how to fly (in design) #highflyers #pushyourself'

We also created an emoji sentence to convey our mission statement, representing a bird being pushed out of the nest.