A Reflection on my Professional Placement at the Bureau

A Reflection on my Professional Placement at the Bureau Renee Chung

The past twelve months of being on professional placement at the Bureau have not only enabled me to learn about the design industry and how Swinburne as a business governs itself, but also about myself as a designer, communicator and employee.

When I first started at the Bureau my goals were about improving my confidence and technical skills, running promotional campaigns and building up my reputation.

After six months, my goals changed to more long-term skills and practices which would help me in my future career. I challenged myself to push my designs beyond what was originally suggested by clients to facilitate better communicate with their audience. Also challenging myself to push my designs and design thinking, work more with the analytics and strategy of media campaigns and experiment with different styles of working and developing ideas.

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Professional Skills

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I have developed more as a professional than I did with my technical industry skills at the Bureau, even though I did learn many technical industry skills. I have changed from my time at the Bureau from a design student to a young professional with skills in design and communication. I have also developed a professional reputation for myself. As Keith Denton (2010, pp. 6-7) says, a good professional reputation is made up from the following: 1. Being informed 2. Focusing on the business 3. Seeking out work and collaborating, cooperating and communicating 4. Projecting confidence and capability 5. Publicly recognising others 6. Making yourself visible and 7. Being a problem solver I have aimed to address all these areas during my time at the Bureau.

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Being informed My first steps when I started at the Bureau was to absorb and find out as much information as possible about key contacts, processes and who was in charge of what. By maintaining that knowledge and contact list of people all the way through, I became a source of knowledge for people to come to me and ask questions because they knew I had the answer.

Focusing on the business

Seeking out work

Due to the Bureau needing to be self-funded, we need to take on projects that become our bread and butter as well as streamline certain design processes. By developing templates for regular designs like Design Lecture series posters and PHD research postcards, we were able to get jobs done more efficiently that supported the Bureau most financially.

It was the Bureau’s goal this year to expand its client-base by getting news of the services provided around the university. While it wasn’t exactly my job, mentioning the Bureau and the design services it offered to anyone I was in contact with was a way for us to get new clients. This included research centres who then promoted us via word of mouth to other research centres at Swinburne based on previous works, previous lecturers from the Media and Communications department and contacts from Student Life who we were able to advertise events to students through. It was important then to outline our processes and have good systems in order for potential clients to trust the validity of the Bureau of a business.

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Publicly recognising others As part of my role, I ran the social media channels, which publicly promotes the work and research of those in the Swinburne School of Design. The skills charts that I developed for the designers in the Bureau which celebrates learning also publicly recognised their skills to my colleagues and any visitors to our office. It is celebrated when a Bureau designer ‘levels up’ on a skill.

Making yourself visible Part of my being informed and seeking out collaboration was also making myself known to the other staff in the Swinburne School of Design, being seen at events attending, filming or photographing to cement my reputation as being connected to Swinburne Design and being involved in the broader design community at Swinburne such as through the Swinburne Design Collective, filming students or going to design events such as the twenty six fundraising gallery exhibition.

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Projecting confidence and capability While I needed to work on my confidence when I first started the Bureau, I found out that even though I wasn’t confident in my skills, the clients were based on how the Bureau was branded and promoted. I stopped comparing myself to other designers and instead started promoting the design I could do, such as poster designs and video editing. Developing confidence in those areas helped me realise that I needed a can-do attitude which was half of the reason I wasn’t confident in my other design skills. By convincing myself that I could design with typography, photography and animation, I was motivated to learn and had opportunities to practice them with mentorship.

Being a problem solver Being a problem solver: Due to maintaining my knowledge and connections about processes within Swinburne and design processes within the Bureau, I was able to help people connect with each other and understand what they need. I also developed a habit of asking my colleagues ‘why’ and ‘what if’ to make them think about what they were designing. Asking myself the same questions when stuck and voicing these ideas has helped me find design solutions including understanding the correct Swinburne way to get quotes, payments and designs to the approved printers. Importantly, I have written down these processes in a booklet to help with my changeover, pre-emptively solving the problem of unawareness to my replacement.

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Photography Projects

Korean War Memorial Opening Photography and Direction

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Ride Your Bike to Work Day Honours Hattitude Campaign Photography and Direction

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GradX Committee 2019

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Lessons From my Placement

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Learning when to say no and learning that I can’t help everyone.

There is only so much that the role of your expected duties can stretch. While people might ask you to do things that are outside of your role, you have to remember what your normal duties are too. There’s a balance between opportunity to expand your knowledge and being overrun with projects that you’re not meant to be involved with. Usually this is someone else taking advantage of you and your skills and caution is needed when accepting these opportunities. Ways to navigate this include offering your services within your role and explaining where your limits lie for being involved in the project. Alternatively, you can direct them to people you know who have the skills they require or who are more qualified than you to help them.

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The importance of having good processes and communication.

Being at the Bureau has taught me how important it is to have design processes and ensure everyone knows what’s going on to ensure the smooth operation of the studio and the workload of its employees. Part of my process development was realising that I perform best when things are organised well and my space is neat and organised. I have developed written processes which detail how to file jobs and ensure they can be accessed again if needed. This is also part of good communication, ensuring that all involved parties are aware of what is going on to prevent misunderstandings or jumping to conclusions.

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I like it when my work helps people and informs them of what’s going on.

I have loved seeing people being able to navigate their way through event spaces, or see people show up to an event due to a consistent design and communication strategy. Cygnis Media Editor (2015) writes that “Good designs are those that go unnoticed, that are experienced, that are invisible; bad designs are everywhere and stand out like a sore thumb.”

This was reinforced from my early university career again in the Bureau that ‘good design’ is when people hardly notice it due to it fitting the needs of the people who are using it. I have liked experimenting on creating seamless and full communication strategies with my designs with attention to detail.

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I work better in a team than by myself so I can bounce ideas off them.

Working in a small team and utilising everyone’s design skills and previous life experience has taught me that I love to hear others’ ideas and grow even better ideas by collaborating. I have come to the conclusion that good design needs to be developed by lots of people who have ideas, suggestions, different insights and experiences to draw upon and improve the design. If a design is only created by one person, then it really only serves that one person perfectly. In my future career I will always ask for feedback and take ideas and constructive criticism on board – because it’s another perspective I may not have thought about. This think has also been what has helped me with receiving feedback on my work.

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Being in design and communication requires creativity which works best when I’m rested.

I have learnt during my time in the Bureau that this comes from being in a positive environment, both physically and emotionally.

There needs to be space for hands on exploration, mind-mapping thoughts, pinning things up and displaying work you’re proud of.

However there also needs to be good relationships within the team, an understanding of individual skills and goals to take advantage of a nurture and transparency about workload. A stressed mind is not creative or thinking of new ideas so to ensure maximum creativity, it is important that the environment encourages and enables creative expression. It is also important to use my downtime to properly rest so I can use my creativity for work.

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Non-Swinburne Branded Designs

Centre for Design Innovation new logo concept

Content creation for Go Against the Flow socials @GATFaus

Tim Winton backlist 40th Anniversary cover designs

Watercolour painting for Swinburne thankyou cards

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We zoeken naar patiënten met diabetes mellitus type 2 (suikerziekte) die in een ziekenhuis zijn opgenomen voor een verergering van har�alen.

We willen een onderzoek doen naar de werking van een nieuw medicijn.

Het medicijn heet sotagliflozine, en het onderzoek heet SOLOIST. Voordat u beslist om mee te doen, is het belangrijk dat u goed geïnformeerd bent. Deze informatiemap vertelt u meer over het onderzoek.

Swinburne Branded Designs IMPROVING VISUAL COMMUNICATION DESIGN presented by Prof Dr Karel van der Waarde

ACROSS

DIALOGUES OF EXPLORATION: NEW TASKS, NEW TOOLS Presented by Professor Rob Woodbury

Presented by Amy Muir

TRANSFORMATION

Director of MUIR, RMIT Lecturer and current Victorian President of the Australian Institute of Architects.

LECTURE 1

LECTURE 2

CAN I RELY ON YOUR DESIGN CAPABILITIES?

HOW TO CONVINCE EVERYONE THAT YOUR DESIGN IS EXCEPTIONAL.

About reflective practice and visual arguments

About user involvement and research

Wednesday 16th October 5pm – 6pm TD Building Room 121

Wednesday 30th October 5pm – 6pm TD Building Room 121

Visual communication designers provide an essential service in information-rich societies. Visual information is vital for work, education, and leisure. Many legal, financial, and medical activities depend on it, and visual information enables navigation in both physical environments and on screens. However, this variety of practical applications does not make it easy to determine what the core of this profession is.

Visual communication designers need to provide evidence and arguments to support their claims.

Stating that something is ‘well designed’ might reassure some, but several other interests need to be considered too. Finding a balance between commercial, legal, disciplinary, usability, and societal expectations is a central challenge in visual communication design.

This lecture will focus on visual communication design as a professional activity, and its needs for education.

This lecture will focus on the criteria to assess visual communication design, and the merits of userinvolvement and research.

PRESENTED BY NEIL STONELL Partner, Grimshaw

ACROSS will look at the practice of MUIR and the varying influences that inform the work through teaching, research, collaboration and industry advocacy with Amy Muir’s current role as the Victorian President of the Australian Institute of Architects.

At a time when change is constant, architecture needs to respond to the pressures of the world through singularly responsible ambition, while managing the multiple demands on the places we seek to transform, or create. In a presentation mixing projects and personal experiences, Neil will illustrate how he, and Grimshaw, have applied this vision to projects across the globe. To see more about Grimshaw and Neil’s work visit www.grimshaw.global

Free public lecture: Tuesday 17 September, 2019 5pm – 6pm Swinburne Protolab, TB Building Room 102

Monday 10 February 2020 3pm – 4pm AMDC 912/913 Light refreshments provided Accounts of designing argue for rapid, plentiful and available design representations as core to design media supporting creativity. We label such accounts as dialog with the design situation. Design space exploration models design as movement tracing explicit paths through an implicit space of possibilities. Past approaches to design space exploration largely focus on these paths, that is, they concern themselves with design space structure, posing overhead at odds with the dialog of creative design. Fusing dialog and exploration yields a new perspective on interacting with designs in which immediate designer-directed interaction structures exploration rather than the formal structure of design space. We argue that applying this perspective requires focus on a particular design medium as each such medium creates its own task environment that may necessarily limit generalization of the results obtained. In this paper we choose the representation of parametric modeling and present an architecture for and features of directly interactive design gallery systems that enable designer-directed rapid making, editing, saving and selecting designs, as well as expanding the resulting design spaces. We demonstrate the system architecture and features through examples taken from a series of design space explorers developed and evaluated in our lab.

Free public lecture Thursday 24 October, 2019 5.30pm – 6.30pm Swinburne Protolab TB102

Nibbles provided

Register now at swi.nu/q5ytu

Register now at swi.nu/hfrwq

Robert Woodbury BArch (Carleton, Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal), MSc and PhD (Carnegie Mellon) has served on the faculty at CMU (1982-1993), Adelaide University (1993-2001), Technical University of British Columbia (2001-2002) and is now at Simon Fraser. He was founding Graduate Program Chair in Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU. From 2005-2008 he was Scientific Director of the Canadian Design Research Network and is currently the Director, Art and Design Practice of the Graphics, Animation and New Media Network. His research is in computational design, visual analytics and sustainability. He has over 150 publications, including his 2010 book Elements of Parametric Design. In 2009 he chaired Team North, a Canadian entry to the 2009 Solar Decathlon. In 2008 he was awarded the Innovative Research Award from the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture and the Tee Sasada Award from the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia. In 2000 he won the Stephen Cole the Elder Prize at Adelaide University. He is a former Olympian in sailing.

Design Futures Join us to celebrate Swinburne University of Technology’s 2019 design graduates as we showcase student work from all disciplines Advanced Manufacturing and Design Centre (AMDC), Burwood Road, Hawthorn Exhibition: 9am – 5pm from 26 – 28 November 2019 Awards Night: 5.30pm – 10pm Thursday 28 November 2019

@GradXSwinburne

behance.net/GradXSwinburne

CENTRE FOR URBAN TRANSITIONS Leading the Science of Cities with Actionable Knowledge for Cities

Awards Night Presentations: 5.30pm 5.45pm 5.45pm 6.15pm 6.45pm

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Prof. Linda Kristjanson AO, Vice Chancellor Design Factory Melbourne Industrial Design/Product Design Engineering Architecture/Interior Architecture Communication Design

(Lvl 3) (Lvl 3) (Lvl 6) (Lvl 5) (Lvl 3)

swinburne.edu.au/research/urban-transitions CUTransitions@swin.edu.au +61 3 9214 5286 @CUTransitions

Poster designs for events and place branding

Industry Knowledge

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By being able to design every day, I have developed my eye for composition, the rhythm for videography and how to design collateral within the Swinburne brand. I have revised skills such as the basics of typography, photography and direction and how to set out different types of design in InDesign and Illustrator which I was lacking confidence in before I started. I have also learnt how to use new software like Adobe Animate and Adobe After Effects which I was required to learn as part of some Bureau projects.

Undertaking photography jobs and being mentored by photographer Damien Kook, taught me new skills in photography including Adobe Lightroom.

As with all design businesses, you need to have somewhere to produce your designs.

Helpful knowledge that I learnt this past year was the difference between Offset and Digital printing, when to use them and some of the techniques that could be produced with different printers. I learnt more about paper stocks, finishes and how to create print ready files as well which taught me how much more there was to a design project than sitting there with a mock-up or theoretical design. There’s a lot more thinking into the use and feasibility of the design – and it’s a good idea to be friends with a printer!

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Future Career Aspirations

I have realised that being organised means I understand and maintain processes and can develop processes to meet the needs of people and help them. In doing so I am an organisational leader and people can rely on me. I would like to have a leadership and management role in a creative team. My experience being on placement has also taught me the importance of maintaining a good healthy and nurturing environment for creatives, where achievements are celebrated, any idea is an idea worth exploring and people feel safe and encouraged to be creative.

From this, I have decided I would like to either climb the ranks of advertising from a creative to an executive creative director and one day running a creative department or managing a studio. I have also been accepted into an international internship in Dublin, Ireland over June and July 2020 to explore my career options and gain real experience in my other degree, media and communications.

Finally, I want to set myself the challenge to do something creative every day. Other designers may undertake the design every day challenge “building skills, trying out different techniques, and discovering new ways to look at their work and the world” (Kliever 2020), but in the industry I’m going into, practicing music, performing, painting, graphic design, videoing, photography, decorating and craft are all things to keep my creative mind well-nourished and ready for use in the future. As Eric Kim (2017) writes, “With art, you have ultimate freedom and the chance to flex your creative muscles. Being creative every day gives you a chance to explore, learn and have a reason to be excited to wake up in the morning.”

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Advice to my preplacement self While technical skills are important, what’s more important is your willingness to learn them and immerse yourself in the current trends of the industry. It’s more important to develop your composition skills, client relation skills, team leadership skills and design processes, because they’re the design skills you will always need.

Ensure that you keep being involved in design communities whether that be through university or elsewhere, because there is where you’ll meet people with lots of different ideas.

It will prevent your industry knowledge and design thinking from becoming stale from being in the one place and provide different design solutions and innovative ideas that will help you stay employable and relevant.

Remember to market and promote things you do.

Your reputation is a culmination of the skills and work you advertise, the experiences people have working with you, the people you meet and the ideas and opinions you share.

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Content Writing and Copy Editing Projects

Overcoming Collaboration Challenges in the Modern Workplace

SYMPOSIUM

ENABLING SPACES. SHIFTS, DRIFTS AND PARADOXES IN PUBLIC SPACE Monday 15 and Tuesday 16 July 2019 Siteworks, 33 Saxon Street Brunswick

MEASURING ALIGNMENT AND INTENTIONALITY OF SPORT POLICY ON THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS November 2019

Enabling Spaces. Shifts, Drifts and Paradoxes in Public Space: Living Politics in the City 2.

An international symposium where academia and practice meet to explore the connections and contradictions, tensions and paradoxes in contemporary public space. We will discuss new forms of identity and agency with private occupation of public space, how acts of appropriation by one party necessarily mean displacement of others, the informal rules that define or create contemporary public space and the layers of individual or collective relationships at play.

Swinburne University of Technology - Research team: Associate Professor Emma Sherry, Dr Christine Agius, Dr Cheree Topple, Dr Sal Clark Commonwealth Secretariat

SWINBURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN 2019 GRAD SHOW Sponsorship Information Brochure

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Published Articles

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References: Cygnis Media Editor 2015, ‘Good Design Is Invisible; Bad Design Is Everywhere’, Cygnis Media, 31 July, viewed 3 February 2020, <www.cygnismedia.com/blog/good-design-isinvisible/>.

Denton, D.K. 2011, “A call to all L&D, OD and HR professionals: how can you increase your professional reputation?”, Development and Learning in Organizations, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 6-7.

Kim, E 2017, ‘How to Be Creative Every Day’, Eric Kim Photography, 23 November, viewed 3 February 2020, <erickimphotography.com/blog/2017/11/23/how-to-becreative-every-day/>.

Kliever, J 2020, Why you should design something new every day: 20 awesome case studies to inspire you, Canva, viewed 3 February 2020, <https://www.canva.com/ learn/design-new-every-day/>.

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