15 minute read
Humans of UniSA
Everyone has a story. Humans of UniSA is a deep dive into the lives of our fellow students to unravel the threads of their personal history, quiet ambitions, and their hopes, worries and joys. Take a fleeting glance into the vivid lives we pass by each day in the hallways and classrooms of UniSA.
Welcome to my office. What do you want to know? Tell you about me. I am male…this isn’t going to work if you laugh the whole time. So tell you about me. I am a male. I am 22 years old and I study product design at UniSA and I’m in my third and last year of that. My hobbies include procrastinating, and not doing uni work whatsoever. I don’t know how I’m going to pass this year. This COVID-19 thing is really doing me up the arse as well, which is fun.
Ah…because when it came to selecting uni subjects when we were in year 12, my parents did it for me and thought that I’d be good at this so they did all my preferences and this is what I—I just rocked up. I was like ‘oh!’, you know. Mum and dad: ‘oh yeah, you got enrolled in this, congratulations.’ You beauty, sign me up. I’ll get on the bus and just rock up and here I am. Only five years later.
I feel like this isn’t anything to do with the interview. Um… Do my parents make a lot of life choices for me? Well, yeah I guess up until the age of, I don’t know, like, ten mum still dressed me. I think that’s probably when she stopped. At 11 I decided that I’d choose my own clothes.
I like product design…why do I like product design? The fact that I understand on a philosophical level what being a designer is and I think that helps me understand, like, the work better. So I think that design is mostly about a process—things don’t just happen. I think most people understand that but if you understand your process as a designer then that’s how you become a better designer and that includes being able to resonate with clients or empathise with the target audience or end user. So firstly, you have to understand that you completely strip down that you don’t know anything about whatever you’re— WHAT?... What?...the fuck? Yes. I’m doing an interview— Are you going to put in how much you’re laughing as well?
As I was saying, you know, Sydney Swans are a really good football team.
So for me it’s like—we are actually currently doing a subject called Design Cultures and Societies, which is looking in detail at this. But if I was to approach it I would firstly read the brief 10 million trillion times and even then you won’t understand the brief so you have to then identify—you have to ask yourself a bunch of questions like: who, what, when, where, why, how, sort of stuff. And then you actually have to go out and ask the people who are the ‘who.’ Right so, if I’m designing a toothbrush for a five-year-old, I’d have to go and ask five-year-olds what they want in a toothbrush.
Well, I don’t know. That’s exactly the point. So, the design process is saying I don’t know anything about the toothbrush anymore and then going out and finding— because everyone’s got preconceptions about everything, right? But you don’t—well this is what you will find is that you run into dead ends if you just design on what you think everything is. So the design process, I feel, it starts with being able to make yourself vulnerable and say ‘I don’t know anything about something’ which is whatever you are wanting to design, and going and finding out what the actual user wants, how they operate and how they interact with the existing products. So in terms of design process, I think from there you have to maintain the user and that experience in your mind when you rinse and repeat everything. But it’s about having your stable building blocks, which is research and understanding, which I think I’m pretty good at. Not blowing my own horn or anything.
You know, I really like anal. Don’t put that in. No! That’s a lie, you can’t put lies in. Hey, what am I claiming?—I’ll sue you.
What else do I like? I like computer games, and I like surfing and I like music. I like doing those things on repeat for hours on end and that’s about it. Hanging out with my friends, playing sport, loving my girlfriend so, so much. Oh, I buy her chocolates every Tuesday, I bring her flowers every Friday and we have sex once a year.
Well see, I’ll paint a picture: sex swing—actually, I feel uncomfortable in this interview talking about my sexual prowess.
Well, surfing I just watch a lot of surfing videos and hope that I then dream about surfing so then it’s like I’m kind of actually surfing. Well, the other night I met Kelly Slater, two nights ago I met Fisher the DJ and we surfed and hung out all day so that was kind of cool. What are other dreams I’ve been having recently…? But yeah mostly I think COVID-19 is making me appreciate my dreams a lot more and I try and like, you know, watch something on Instagram or whatever and then immediately go to sleep afterwards and hope that I dream about whatever I’ve been looking at. So that then I kind of live through like a virtual reality but it’s like a dream.
Actually, can I talk about the wholesomeness that I had on Saturday night? Okay. So, me and the lads decided that we were going to Zoom. Zoom call. I’m sure everyone is familiar with Zoom now—thanks a lot COVID. We were going to Zoom and we were each going to drink six beers and it was a race to drink six beers the quickest. And you know, lots of shenanigans ensued. One of my mates passed out at his computer with the light on and woke up and wondered what had happened and I had to fill him in and yeah it was just an all round great time. It was weird—I sort of felt like they were there with me even though I was just drunk in my bedroom all alone. It felt like I had a real connection with them. So that was something that was wholesome. ☐
Chris Shute Bachelor of Design (Product Design)
Edition 33 | 2020
Emily Tomassian Bachelor of Social Work
Ihad been working in hospitality for a long time when I remembered that once upon a time, I had been wanting to work in conservation and land management. So, in 2011 I went to the TAFE open day to look at courses at Urrbrae, and it was really up my alley. I was excited that there was something out there like that because I didn’t know that there was something so practical out there, like fieldwork. I studied for two years at TAFE and completed a Diploma of Conservation and Land Management. I went on to start a degree in Biodiversity and Conservation at Flinders Uni, but it was less practical than I wanted it to be. I worked in the field for a few years, but it was um... well the field could be rewarding, but it was pretty heavy manual labour and a lot of the work was a hybrid of landscaping and conservation work, which is not what I had wanted to do. I thought about going back to uni to study conservation again, but you know, given government funding cutbacks in fields like that, I thought it probably wasn’t a very sustainable career. Part of my hospitality background included some very specific experience making raw desserts, so I started and ran a small raw dessert business for a few years, but that wasn’t something that I found very fulfilling either, so I decided to go back to uni and study social work.
What drew me to Social Work? Probably the same thing that drew me to conservation—wanting to have a career that’s fulfilling but also practical, in a sense of ‘taking action.’ When I thought about what other things I was passionate about aside from conservation, social justice was one of them. I was hoping to be able to use some of my other qualifications as well, including my background in yoga teacher training, roll and release therapy and also meditation. It’s an area which has a large focus on mental health and personal wellbeing, and I realised that this was one of the reasons why people came to use these services. It made me think that I wanted a career in a service that allowed me to work with people meaningfully, but at the same time, I didn’t like the direction that the yoga movement had taken. It’s something that has been appropriated and co-opted in a way which has caused it to become rather elitist and inaccessible to many people, for various reasons. Classes can be financially inaccessible for some, labels are telling people that you need to buy certain clothes or have a certain figure or level of fitness before you can even start yoga, it’s often inaccessible for people with different physical abilities and other special populations. It’s often very ego driven too, and I realised that it wasn’t an industry that I wanted to be a part of, so yeah I decided to study social work instead. I think that the therapeutic benefits of yoga and meditation are significant, so I am hoping that there will be an opportunity for me to incorporate this skillset into a social work practice too.
Aspects of my course which interest me change all of the time because with every topic, you find a new point of view and gain a new insight into things, but something that I have realised is that I have a particular interest in working with youth to limit their engagement with the youth justice system. I would be really interested in working on programmes such as justice reinvestment for youth, and I would like to do more work with overrepresented groups in the system, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth. I’m interested in the challenges which are unique to LGBTQIA+ communities too, including overrepresentation in rates of suicide, poor mental health, homelessness, lack of support networks and engagement with community, isolation and so on...
I identify as a queer Armenian woman. Although I identify as Armenian, I’m not in contact with my father, who represents the Armenian side of my heritage. I have a few memories from when I was younger, but I don’t feel like I have a solid base to go into a community and feel like I belong. That’s something that I’d like to work on, probably when I finish my degree. What would that look like? Probably engaging with the local community, maybe a trip over eventually, but I think it’s more sustainable to engage with people here to gain an understanding of my heritage and culture. I think that there will potentially be aspects of the culture that I already connect with that I don’t know that I was unaware of, or that I will find to be reflected in my personality. Yeah, being very outwardly emotional is my experience of my father and my grandmother. Apart from that, we’re very... well my father and my grandmother were very hypervigilant and anxious. I think for Armenians, that comes from a history of persecution. My grandmother and my father came over as refugees, and my grandmother lived through the Armenian Genocide, so I think that they both carried a lot of that trauma with them. It impacted their lives and their relationships and how they moved through the world and interacted with people on a daily basis.
When I finish my degree, I would like to be working in advocacy. I’d like to be working rurally, within communities. I would like to be working on projects with a view towards decolonisation, and promoting connection to language and country for the Indigenous population... it’s a hard thing for me to talk about because at the end of the day I’m still just another white person, you know what I mean? There are a lot of areas I’d like to work in... it’s hard. It’s really just advocacy that’s important to me, and there are lots of things I would like to do within that.
I guess in terms of sex and sexual politics, I really think that we still need to make more moves towards the destigmatising female sexuality, and at the same time, stop over sexualising women’s bodies. I mean, that sentence sounded contradictory, but you know... when I was growing up, anyone who was sexually active was considered a slut— well women that is. Not men, men were commended. Any girls who had multiple sexual partners were stigmatised, so I think that probably, the intervention needs to happen early, like in schools, teaching that sex is natural and normal and that there is no different measure for men and women, or for boys and girls. ☐
Iwas always a creative kid. Heaps into music. Yeah, I think that was my main creative outlet for a long time.
Not making it but consuming it. I’m a big fan of hip-hop. I got into comedy in my early 20s. I was like, ‘I want to do that,’ so I just started doing it.
It’s been almost five years now. Just wrapped up Fringe where I had my first solo show, solo hour. It was pretty good. Fringe kind of sucks though. It’s becoming an increasingly corporatised climate. New and up-coming artists, that don’t have management, struggle to fill seats, whilst paying exorbitant amounts for room hire, Fringe registration and advertising etc. You put all this effort in, years worth of talent and hours and hours and hours of work, trying to build a show that hopefully means something to you and that you’re proud of, you know. You do all that to fill half the room every night and not make your money back. You lose money.
I started this degree, partially, to help with comedy. There’s a lot of aspects behind it that help with that, just in terms of the graphic design and everything, you know. I’m also a really big fan of film and cinema.
I’ve always been into weird stuff. Surreal stuff. I think in every aspect. I’m getting more weirder though. If you saw me when I first started comedy it was much more normal. Normal is boring. I like expressing myself in an abstract way. It’s like, expressing yourself through layers. If you ask my ex-girlfriend, she’d probably agree that I don’t know how to express myself like a normal person. I’m just psychoanalysing myself now, I guess. Is this supposed to be an interview or a therapy session—what are you doing to me here?
I’ve heard the market in Melbourne, it’s easier to do like weird comedy. My comedy. It’s weird, surrealist, kind of conversational, observational stuff, which I heard fairs better in Melbourne. And Adelaide… bunch of philistines.
I guess, that’s the thing. I don’t want to throw away certain aspects of my artistic creativity in order to get more people coming to my shows. I made all my own posters, I did all the graphic design myself, the marketing, everything was done by me. Catered to what I thought it should look like and feel like. Evidently, that’s not appealing to a broader audience. But I’m not sure how much I want to sacrifice to get more people in. And they’re going to be stupid anyway. They’re not going to understand the show. They’re not going to like the jokes. We haven’t progressed very much here in terms of comedy.
I know I’m sounding—what’s the word?—obnoxious. No, stuck up? Narcissistic? Nah, what’s the other one? Just, up himself. Hoity toity. I understand how I sound. I know I sound like that. But I’m not wrong, that’s the thing. The general public don’t really care about the arts. They go see Peter Hellier or fucking Hughesy in the Garden. No one really takes a risk on the smaller, lesser-known artists. I don’t think anyone flips through the Fringe guide and thinks, ‘that sounds interesting to me, I’ll go see that.’ They just go, ‘Oh Hughesy he’s great, he does that bit about, you know, trains.’ Amazing. What a conceptually brilliant idea, comparing the public transit system here in Australia to England. Fucking brilliant. Who could come up with such a nuanced out there concept!
Yeah, I’m salty! I lost money! Cost me thousands of dollars to do this. Half my friends are quitting, I have a right mind to follow suit. But I’m—Nah. I’m not gonna quit.
Basically, I want to come out of this degree and try to find a job in the film industry to support my comedy. Or, potentially, use the skills that I’ve learnt in my degree to get jobs in comedy. Not necessarily “career” jobs, but you know gigs; film gigs and graphic design work, which I have been doing. During Fringe I had a few film jobs: filming shows and editing them; graphic design; designing people’s posters. I didn’t charge lots, I’m still trying to get my foot in the door.
Creativity? I don’t understand people who don’t have something. Some kind of art that they pursue. Whether it’s music or writing, painting, photography, anything. I don’t understand how people exist without a creative outlet. I feel like you’re kind of, like, desolate. I’m not sure where I’d be without comedy. I think I’d just be sad. Every Monday, I run a comedy night at the Rhino Room. Giggles Comedy. It’s heaps of fun! ☐
Interview and photography Nina Phillips
