Student Project

Experiencing Insights for Design Careers

September 9, 2015
Dennis Cheatham

It’s not easy to figure out where to start a design career because there are so many types of design available to early-career designers. Graphic design including branding, packaging, and publication design challenge designers in vastly different ways than experience-focused work like interaction and experience design. To address this need, MFA students in Experience Design developed an experience to help give undergraduate students in our Graphic Design major some clarity on where to start.

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Cards that detailed design career interest areas, ready for testing.

Kansu Ozden, Bryant Thomas, and Paulina Zeng spent one hour developing a series of cards that acted as prompts to spark thinking about a student’s own design interests. After participants selected the cards they most identified with, commonalities were revealed and design career insights were discovered. As Miami Graphic Design students from the Applied Interaction Design course participated in the experience, MFA students studied their reactions, revised the experience, and iteratively tested it to improve its overall effectiveness.

While this was just an two-hour exercise, it provided insights for both graduate students who were developing their design expertise in new ways, and for undergraduate students who were still figuring out what their careers in design may be.

More photos from this experience.

 

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