my portfolio 2017 unit 1 ma industrial design giorgia rossi
index
1.1 Connection Critical Interrogation of Practice (CIP)
CIP 1: Hacking the city
CIP 2: Food
CIP 3 + 4: Death
1.2 Client Project: Huawei 1.3 Product as Platform
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Visions
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Conclusions
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intro September 21st, 2013 was the first day of my Industrial Design BA in Bologna, my hometown. I was excited and worried at the same time, a new life experience had just started and I had no clues about my future yet. Three years have passed in the blink of an eye, I have learned and grew a lot, as my interest in every single declination of this subject did. September 22nd, 2016, was the first day of my Industrial Design MA, in London, my adoptive city. I was even more excited and worried because, in addition to the start of a new studying career, I had to move to a mysterious huge international city. Again, almost six months have passed extremely fast and this portfolio is the written evidence of my personal growth, describing how every little thought and practise have been helpful to define me as Industrial Designer and, most importantly, as an adult. I would like this to be a useful reflection tool for clearing my mind and understanding myself, a collection of memories and tips I can read again in the future and a critical journal of my personal progresses and know-hows.
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1.1 connections The brief A Rube Goldberg machine made of all the projects of MAID first year. The process 1 design each mechanism 2 make the connections to the previous and the next ones 3 test it (over and over again) Did it work? Almost.
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tips for the future Patience is a minimum requirement for this project, since you have to test it up to 100 times per hour. Make it re-settable so it will easier for you to reiterate the trials.
know-hows manuality progresses: wood workshops metal workshop painting and spraying
reflections One: design for you. Two: think for three. Three: thrill.
personality progresses teamworking and collaboration reiterative testing and patience
When I was 8, my mother brought me to a painting class. I still think that was the first little prompt for my design process to begin. This project is about expressing yourself through a kinetic sculpture: that’s why I wanted to restart from my roots, with the technique I loved the most. If you think you’re doing the mechanism working just for yourself, you’re so wrong. You have then to consider the machines before and after you and find a way to connect the three. So, when Gege’s machine hits the back of the mannequin’s painted head, the bell crank hidden inside pushes a ball which rolls down the mouth and starts Koa’s engine. In the end, when everything has been set up, you become a spectator and the entire action leaves you breathless.
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critical interrogation of practice (cip) The brief Explore the liaison between the pursuit of authenticity with the establishment of the latest technologies across the thematics of hacking the city, food and death. The process 1 Explore different areas of the city with a naive attitude, engaging with the inhabitants 3 Design a contextualized service or experience from the acquired insights 4 Communicate the results through performances and captivating narratives The group Courses: MA Industrial Design, MA Material Futures, MA Design Ceramics, Furniture and Jewellery. Countries: Italy, Corea, UK.
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reflections
tips for the future
Discover the world, brave and naive, through the other's eyes.
CIP is an intensive project which requires fully devotion to it but for a very short time. Schedule your timings and organize yourself properly to make it for the deadline. Think outside the box, but keep it as simple as possible.
CIP has been the most distant project from my previous background practice. It was my first experience with such a deep engaging and exploration of the outside world. The first one was about hacking the city: I could not imagine a better way to start my immersion in a new city, with its own culture and language. We were randomly assigned to the Kennington district, an area which otherwise I would not probably ever discovered. This place was unknown both for me and the other groupmates, so we divested ourselves of any preconceptions. We headed to Kennington Park and our attention has been drawn to the strict byelaws of the place: there was a rule for any possible behaviour and it seemed people could have very limited freedom to enjoy the beautiful park. Our response to it was to find a funny way for the visitors to respect these rules, especially one of them: “No person shall leave open any gate to which this Byelaw applies and which he has opened or caused to be opened.� The outcome is a buzz wired game, which only works with a closed gate. We have been interacting with visitors asking them to draw possible paths for that game and it was really interesting to see how much they enjoyed being involved in the design process. If we had a few more time, we could have developed it further, creating a working prototype and letting people play for real to reflect more on the user experience.
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Having learned that from our previous experience, for the CIP after we employed a better time management. Inspired by Marcel Proust’s madeleine, we chose to focus on the power of food to recapture past memories: after setting our tablecloth and some biscuits, we asked people to read a postcard left by someone else and meanwhile enjoy the sweets. Then, aroused by the taste of the food and the Christmas atmosphere, they have had to write their own piece of memory and give it to the person next to them, creating a chain of emotions and sensations driven by taste and remembrances. Tasting a piece of cake while I am writing down these memories, reminds me of one of the funniest and most carefree project of the term, and it will be interesting working again on these thematics to come up with concrete design applications.
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tips for the future Don’t be shy. CIP’s first aim is to deal with people and understand their needs to include them in possibile design solutions for the future.
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For CIP 3, we chose to discuss ideas around dealing with bereavement and digital assets after death: by thinking globally about how we might connect the lives of the passed with the living through digital memories, we designed an app that allows you to feel connected and closer to the deceased person by walking their past footsteps in the present world. All the team and I have recently dealt with death, so we started a discussion on the different rituals among our countries. I have been so lucky to have two British people in my team because I always had the possibility to compare my preconcepts to the reality of the facts.
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During his life, the Memory Donor builds up a collection of his best memories, taking insights directly from other applications on his smartphone. When he is ready, he can choose one person to be his Memory Recipient who will then have access to his Memory Bank after death.
These are the screenshots of the app used by a Memory Recipient: he can explore the moments in map or icons view and, as he opens one, he has access to all the data for that day. In that way, he can live again the moment as if he was there and also share it with people who will be pleased to receive it.
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We develop our CIP 3 project into our CIP 4 film, in the form of an advert for the app that captured the concept and the mood behind. We began by considering the interactive elements of the app and how we might be able to use these in the film to bring the experience to life. Time and location, weather, heartbeat, people they shared that experience with and music a person was listening to are all possible insights the living could donate through the app.
We decided to overlap all these data in order to build a soundtrack for the film and immerse the viewer in a particular memory scenario.
tips for the future Try to look at your project as a foreigner. If you can’t, show your result to someone else to check if it’s comprehensible enough. In the end, it is important for the audience to clearly receive the message, so be open to any change.
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We then chose to use visuals of a person walking, overlaid with another person walking, to suggest the idea that they are retracing the footsteps. From those two projects, we have understood that there is a need to consider what happens to our digital assets after death and how are they used. So our role as designers was finding a solution to provide the living with a greater sense of control over what happens when they have passed, since everything starts when they decide to became “donors� of their memories. But in the end, when we showed the video to an external public, the result was not so clear. For whom didn’t know anything about the app, it was very difficult to understand the advert, even if some of them stated that the mood was appropriate. Our approach, more like a trailer, wasn't enough and this critique was essential to recognize that we failed in the communication of our concept to an unfamiliar audience, expecting them to see with ourselves eyes and not considering the amount of knowledge required for it. Watching the other groups' films has been a useful tool of comparison and it let me think how we could have implemented ours. In my opinion, we should have explained it a little more, for example through the justaposition of app screenshots or showing people using the app itself.
know-hows manuality progresses: storyboarding and video making (Adobe Premiere) writing and performing a script rough modeling for testing user experience personality progresses teamworking and collaboration communication with strangers divest yourself of any assumptions interaction with the environment
1.2 client project / huawei The brief Design and prototype a new accessory for a smartphone to communicate its creative positioning. The process 1 Background research and technological review in brainstorming sessions 2 Choose of design direction and start of personas and market research 3 Reiterative sketching, quick prototyping and 3d modeling of the selected concept until its best refinement 4 Communication of the final concept in 5 min through a verbal presentation and a video. The group Courses: MA Industrial Design, MA Design Ceramics, Furniture, Jewellery. Countries: Italy, China, Cyprus.
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reflections Don't forget to listen. Fiercely defend your ideas, humbly accept the critiques. I always loved teamworking and my previous experiences have been amazing. I worked in my BA with people who then became my best companions and, even if we went through difficult and disappointing moments, a strong liaison gave us the strength to move forward. I felt to have totally missed that part in this project. But if I better look back at it, I can say that this has been the greatest learning experience I ever had in my life. I always express and support my need to actively participate and collaborate in group projects and I am inclined to become the team leader: motivation, organization and discussion of the results are my main concerns and I believe in the importance of working together to have a quicker and continuous feedback. I tried to act in that way during the client project, but I finally came across to some difficulties and my approach created misunderstandings and conflicts instead.
tips for the future To listen to the needs of your group makes you a better team leader. People from different countries could approach teamworking in different ways, and there is not one unique method for it, so be open to any possibility.
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Belonging to an international school, I have the opportunity to work with people from different countries. The first approach has been surprising: especially during the research period, we focused on the analysis of target and market among our different cultures and costumes and we explored the meaning of luxury starting with the direct immersion in London fanciest areas. Comparing and contrasting the two areas of Luxury and Tech, we defined 3 possible pathways to bring for the first interim critique: 1) the tangible experience through senses (from digital to analog) 2) the exclusiveness through services and experiences 3) the digital art field We had the first conflict when we came up with 5 ideas and could not find an agreement on which ones to select and develop so, with strong uncertainty, we brought all the concepts to the presentation and this has
revealed to be the worst decision ever. Quality is always preferred over quantity and due to our lack of discussion on the different ideas during team working, any concept was strong enough to be pushed forward. There has been even no reasoning about this issue afterwards from part of the group and I felt really disappointed. However, during the second period of working, we had two brilliant lectures by Huawei's design team (The New Thing) and Abigail Brody (ex Apple's Creative Director and now Chief Design Executive of Huawei Consumer) in which they introduced us to the concept of The new aesthetic for the artistic minded new cosmopolitan. At first, we were a bit confused by the change in direction and the exclusion of the term "luxury" from our brief. But we soon acknowledged that our previous definition of luxury was not too distant from the new aesthetic one and our research basis was still useful to understand our target and delineate our goals.
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tips for the future Learn how to better ask questions. If something is unclear, ask for it. If you are the team leader, make sure each member of the group has a clear vision of the whole project.
At this point, we went down to three concepts, supporting three different interpretations of the new aesthetic: 1) 8 Badge and App - promotes creativity through a new experience of the city 2) Followring - enhance the smartphone inner function of guiding, giving it a more precious analog display 3) W Case - craftsmanship and 3d folding structures are employed in an accessory creating a new design language The first one approached better the definition of new aesthetics and we decided to develop it for the final submission. We gave it the name of Urbie and, once defined the touchpoints of our project, we started to design the entire experience around it.
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Urbie is not just a smart accessory, Urbie is crafted, technological and transformable at the same time. Urbie is a lifestyle, an engaging urban game which reflects your activity in the city. Urbie is for the artistic minded new cosmopolitan and it’s building up a community entirely devoted to culture. Urbie is a badge for culture seekers and, combined with UrbieApp, provides to the Huawei user a unique experience.
Urbie Brand Identity Logo, colours, dimensions and communication, through sketches and Adobe Illustrator.
UrbieBadge Design, colours, shapes and materials of the core, the brooch and the charging base, through sketches and 3D models with Rhino.
UrbieApp design of the interface for the subrsciption, sharing and exploring functions with Adobe Experience.
Xiaonan, my groupmate from MA Jewellery, gave us great notions and inspirations from her background and I really enjoy the way she works, overlapping textures, colors and sketches for the moodboards and collecting them in her big scrapbook. I always had great brainstorming sessions with Stella: she has helped me clearing my mind and putting down our ideas. She is also very good in 3D modelling and I can say she is a really hard worker, always by my side during our 24h sessions in the library. The organisation and cohesion of the results was usually up to me. I have tried to find the best way to explain our work even if sometimes it was not easy, cause I wanted everything to be linked or, at least, to have a shared research background and following a process flow.
tips for the future Schedule your work and keep it simple to complete everything you need to have for the deadline. Define the limits for you and for your group and leave the final touches for the ending phase.
The hardest part was to agree on our design proposals for the brooch: language misunderstandings (even if frequent) are comprehensible, but I found out we were unable to share a unique method of concept development. Sometimes part of the group was unavailable to work together, preferring working on their own on different concepts, causing no integration and no exchange of information until the following meetings. I was worried I was doing a lot of work in the worst way, loosing precious time. As a result, in fact, we were always way behind the rest of the groups and I felt a lot of responsibility for it. As team leader, I should have had more influence in some situations: it's important to be patient and try to behave quietly with the other groupmates, especially in stresfull periods and close to deadlines. The best approach would have been try to find the balance between the remaining time available and our abilities, speed and limits. Our process instead, revealed to be an iteration of the same reasonements, often ending with the return to our first idea.
Urbie in its charging box.
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The lecture taken by Mark Delaney (head of the Huawei London Design Studio) in January helped a lot and it has been essential to confirm our positioning, target and context of use and to finally decide the design of Urbie. It consisted in two main parts, the core and the brooch: the core controls all the digital functions, while the brooch shows the reflection of your cultural activity in the city. The core is the key which gives life to Urbie. It is essential for the check-in and Bluetooth paired with the Huawei phone. The connection to the body happens with the metallic pin in the back of it and everything is mechanically jointed with the brooch. The brooch grows as you collect points whenever you check-in in the locations. It consists of a metallic rod construction, over which a flexible textile outer skin has been stretched. The material reacts directly to the forces acting on it, enabling new shapes to come.
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Thanks to its modular nature, its design in interchangeable: according to the seasons, the user can both win or purchase a new version of the badge. The first design has been committed by Huawei to CSM, while the seasons after are going to show collaborations with widely known artists and designers.
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know-hows manuality progresses app mockup developement and ux interface (Adobe Experience Design) storyboarding and video making (Adobe Premiere) 3d modelling (Rhino 3D) rendering (Keyshot)
There were a lot of things to consider for the final presentation video, because we were showing a concept which sometimes semeed to be unclear to part of the group. Aby Brody said: "It's all about telling a story", so we painted our persona as someone who feels dynamic, young, urban with a sense of style. He is thoughtful, never clichĂŠ and never mindless, digitally savvy, interested in art and cultural affairs and Urbie is his new cultural experience. In the end, is the Urbie user itself who defines the new aesthetic, promoting and absorbing culture in all of its shades.
personality progresses auto-refinement of a wide and open brief patience, listening and comprehension during team leading and supporting time scheduling and definition of own limits presentation skills: writing a speech, engaging audience, being sintetic and direct to the point
We produced the storyboard for it and then we went outside to film it. It was interesting to explain our work to strangers and see if they could understand it just after a short introductive explanation. Apart from refreshing some technical skills, this project has been a complete behaviour exercise, letting me practising good sense, calm and better understanding of the other members in order to be ready to deal with conflicts and troubles together. I went through some of the most frustrating moments I ever experienced in my studying career, but I am grateful for having had the opportunity to discover new aspects of myself. Moreover, to receive the hardest bad critiques is the best way to grow up faster, because this makes me reconsider and review my work even after the submission, discovering part of it I have missed before.
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Urbie February 11th 2017
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1.3 product as platform The brief With the aid of agile methods (design improv, dreamscaping, cultural probes etc.) and the implementation of Arduino coding, design a solution for a small everyday problem. The process 1 First approach with Dreamscaping and Cultural Probes methods, to help with the choose of the subject. 2 First definitions of the idea through quick and dirty prototying 3 Prototipation of a small part of the technology through Arduino coding. 4 Design improvisation for user experience trials and concept refinement 5 Polished prototyping and building of an efficace and quick 5' presentation
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reflections Design is an everyday challenge, and the everyone problem has just sit next to you. I spend two entire weeks struggling to find an everyday problem that I wanted to solve or, at least, relieve. I asked family and friends to think about a simple task they hate to do, but this research method was useless. With a group from the class, we decided to meet and try to experiment some dreamscaping methods. It has been interesting to think out of the box, but since none of us had yet decided a refined focus area, it has been still difficult to have any valuable outcome. So I did some personal research and I found the blog "50 Design Problems In 50 Days: Real Empathy For Innovation" by Pete Smart very inspiring. He tried in less than two months to explore the limits of design's ability to solve social problems, big and small. One of his challenges is: "How can design turn productivity from a chore into an enjoyable experience?" I stopped for one second. I started thinking how useful could be a device that helps me to have new ideas. a tool for designers which includes cooperation, challenges and reward, a kind of brainstorming game for producing new concepts. How many times, starting a new project, have I been stuck and cannot move forward or give birth to any relevant ideas? Many, this could be one of the most common issues in the young designer's everyday life. As I researched further, I discovered that whoever has ever been involved in an innovation project (such as artists, engineers, architects, etc.) has gone through those disappointing feelings.
www.50problems50days.com
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The 30 people I interviewed, all stated to prefer an intimate approach to a new brief, working in small groups, couples or on their own. The places where they are more inspired are also narrow and cosy (toilet, shower, bed were mentioned the most), all day long.
Rituals also help to focus and give birth to new ideas, such as using the right pen or preparing the surrounding environment with music, lights or food. The most shared insight I found out is that people, when stuck and unproductive, try to find distractions, some fresh air to their brains.
So my solution is basically an analog dreamscaping, a braintrainer which gives you a bit of inspiration, a tiny starting point from which you may find the idea of the century. It's kind of a distraction tool which, turning your perspective upside-down, helps you to produce ideas in a very short time. 49
The next step was finding which could have been the actions to really help you in this process and Design Improv method helped a lot. I quick and dirty prototyped my first idea box and, with the help of my friends, we filmed our interaction with the tool and we finally understood which were the best responses to my product.
An example of how design improv has been effective, regards the action of drinking beer. At first, this was supposed to be in the middle of the process and distract the designer even more. In the end, after design improvisation, we found that the he is too focused to be distracted by the cold beer, which should be used as a reward instead, at the conclusion of his brainstorming.
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In the meantime, I experimented through Arduino and I created a system of 5 buttons which, pressed in order, send 5 commands on a LCD screen and activate a servo motor which turns a hourglass of 180°. The digital commands have then to be followed with paper and pen, giving this game an analog feeling.
I felt a strong enthusiasm in learning another fundamental and useful tool for my practice. Even if the value of uncertainty is really high. I have always been trhilled by what technology can achieve today and is a knowledge we definitely have to take into consideration because of his changing nature.
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I designed my idea box interface on Adobe Illustrator and it was ready to be laser-cut. Again, that was the first time in this workshop and I was so excited of the amount of skills I was acquiring during the development of the project.
After that, I assembled all the technological and analog parts of my tool and I tried with other people once more. It worked well for a tiny brief, but I am very curious to find out how could it be with a wider one an how could I develop it further, for example integrating brief's words inside the coding, in order to achieve more valuable connections.
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tips for the future Don't more skip thanthe theexperimentation others, this step. This projecttois be all very about project needed everyday small problems scheduled. strict timings which and may involve or persons have clear inyou mind what to like you. So try on yourself and on achieve. your friends to see how it works.
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know-hows manuality progresses quick and dirty prototyping design improvisation method for live user testing physical computing (Arduino) laser cut workshop (and Adobe Illustrator for the drawings) animation for presentation (Adobe After Effects) personality progresses synthetic presentation (less than 5 minutes) iterate design processes and tests understanding the importance of the research and technological review before starting to design using narratives
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visions The aim Visions is conceived as a series of prompts or thought experiments for designers The outcome A collection of ideas (observations, case studies, quotes, etc.) to be added to your own portfolio.
reflections 'Visions' classes interlaced the three projects and CIP in an unexpected way: supporting me from another perspective, I have been capable to take my reflections from those lessons and bring them in different phases of my personal projects.
Furthermore, marvelousness and re-enchant within the mundane is another thematic linked to the design of an everyday object and the lectures have been a good way to distract myself while remaining not too distant from the circle of knowledge.
With Stephen, we dealt with themes strictly connected to them, exploring the opposition between technology and authenticity, fake and reality, enchantment and cargo cults.
One of the last tasks was to bring an extraordinary object. I decided to bring with me a Hasselblad 500 CM which my father bought more than 30 years ago, but it's still considered one of the best analog cameras ever. The reason why I chose this object is not just for its performance, but also for the analog feel it transmitted and the shivering sensations you receive going through the production of every single shot. The knowledge you have to be in possession of makes each step of the photo taking precious, unique and totally intimate.
I learned a lot of precedents, cultures and previous discussions around the study of an object, collecting reflections on the unobvious. In my practice, they helped me underestanding how to defamiliarize in front of a brief, and the discussion of the importance of chance in the design process has been an essential prompt for my platform project. In fact, I can now see connections between what Stephen said about embodiment, performativity and randomness and the design improvisation and dreamscaping methods I employed during my research.
Maybe I was influenced because photography is my passion, but the emotion I get when I finally see my images on paper after a month of two from the shot, is exactly what I would like my future products to communicate: surprise, thrill, autenthicity and enchantment.
tips for the future Each inspiration can be useful for your practice as a designer. Divest yourself from the preconcepts you have and open your ears: you never know where you can be guided to.
know-hows personality progresses defamiliarization in front of a brief critical reflection on my thoughts answer the weirdest questions and start a discussion from it searching for analogies in extremely distant fields 67
conclusions The drafting of this portfolio has revealed to be one of the most demanding exercise I have ever done. It witnesses how much I have improved my skills in this really small amount of time, learning new methods and using completely new tools. I understood during these 6 months how a teaching approach can be different moving from a BA to an MA. In this first term, I have been given a freedom which has nothing in compare to the one I had in my previous taught. Here, I had to deal with wider briefs which could be answered in the most open ways: small challenges and big ones, from the most technologically advanced solution to the purest analogical tool. By freedom, I also mean the possibility CSM gave to me offering workshops, prepared tutors and teachers, technologies and any kind of accessibility I need to explore different area of interest. The most difficult part, which I am still learning, is being careful with this liberty: to manage my time in order to conclude a polished project at least one day before the submission is my next objective.
what's next? My Designer Context research will be focusing on the importance for an industrial product to achieve marketing success. Nowadays, there’s a huge difference between the craftsmanship and the limitedly produced object and the industrial product. The large-scaled one implies a different approach to materials, techniques, costs and production timings. In February, I had the great opportunity to interview Stefano Giovannoni and he gave me relevant information which can be useful for my practice as young industrial designer. There is a question I am still asking to myself: where I see me in the near future? I decided to enrol at CSM mostly because I didn’t clearly have in my mind what my
following steps should have be. I really wanted to see a different approach to Industrial Design and this is exactly what I experienced in this term. Through Designer Profiles lectures and thanks to the big basin of knowledge and opportunities this city has to offer, I feel I am getting closer to the definition of myself. There are a lot of shades of the Industrial Design world I am starting to discover, but I am incredibly excited to the idea that I could have, in a few months, my first work experiences. Lighting design has been the object of my BA major project and I would really like to see if I can take it to the next level, enriching the research around it and trying to find more sensible applications.
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Today is Thursday 9th of March 2017 and I am writing this last sentences while on the tube to Farringdon to print this portfolio. I feel a bit uncertain to be on time, but this is exactly the thrill I need to be pushed foreward.
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