Retrospective on Personal Insentives

I have put together a series of thoughts on why this project came to be, in some ways as a reflection to my final presentation today as I think it was not very clearly represented:

In 2006 I worked and studied on exchange in China. Apart from learning some Chinese and a lot about the Chinese culture I was exposed to many of the wonders of integrated design workflows for small and large teams. In addition to these things I also visited a lot of manufacturers and worked in a design consultancy during the year. Despite the expectations many people often have of the Chinese education market, I came away with quite a different impression. My exposure suggested that the general education service (keeping in mind my experience was centered around the design context) is quite admirable. However, the industrial needs of the country force design graduates and most design companies to work in a context we might refer to as out of date.

The demand for fast industry is not affecting the education content or outcomes, but instead is simply providing an informal de-education for the design workforce. Though this is a great example of the oft overlooked truth - that there are many fewer design strategy jobs in the world than there are for grunt product designers - my immediate reaction was of quite a different nature. Because I was so impressed by the impeccable work ethic and mental stamina of my Chinese colleagues and because I had visited a few of the many thousands of great Chinese universities teaching design, my first thought was to find a way to enable these people to work on projects needing their skill and to avoid their de-education to work as "reverse designers". This is the idea that has lead my project.

As time rarely stands still I originally decided to take a naive approach to this problem. My hope was that I could use the growing Internet world to create a competitive and global design marketplace which would use standardised tools to ensure a simple interaction and contextually aware design service for interesting clients with interesting projects. I thought I could generate competitive leverage and force the standards of design implementation to improve, hence increasing the likeliness of good employment for designers in places like China. Since then my intentions have swayed significantly to a embody a project hub that can be used by designers and design clients everywhere to connect and ensure a good, contextually conscious outcome. The project as a formal for RMIT started in early 2007, at which time I was quite interested in the prospect of helping clean up the design engagement issues of the world.

It is also important to note that I feel that I have a difficulty in choosing project for a series of reasons, but primarily because I am very interested in a range of different areas or forms of study. In fact, the reason I chose to study Industrial Design in the first place was because I saw it as a study that would allow me to work in many contexts and on projects in many other areas of study. This project in particular was chosen because it was representing a real problem I had experienced in China and heard about in other parts of the world and I was really interested in making a development in the area of collaborative systems. It is not that I do not like, or am not interested in, working in any alternative manner - I just find the generality of a project like this one a great asset, as opposed to a conscious decision to make a specific solution to a well defined problem, abstract or physical.

This project hoped to be a solution set for an amorphous problem, and one that hoped not to have a specific definition or outcome. The background on why such an ambiguous area of research seemed attractive, apart from the mentioned lack of clarity, is its meta level similarity to many of the wonderful innovations in systems architecture and thought problems, something which I am beginning to see is one of my strongest interests. I think it could be said that in choosing this project as my major project, I struggled to try to mimic the core values of many of the new world organisations and their approach to global issues. The approaches to this project developed in emphasis from:

1. importance to humanity in China, to
2. being of interest because of its strategic thinking potential, and finally
3. selected as an individual project when I had to make a decision for a seemingly reasonless choice.