alumni weekend

this morning: breakfast and talks with design alumni, the mccoys, and a panel discussion.

good bagels! good talks! one alum brought his 20 year old portfolio to show us, meticulously cut and pasted together into a book. we couldn't imagine how he had gotten some of his effects, given how much they looked like photoshop. one overlay, for example, he achieved like by combining two slides on a projector.

the mccoys spoke about design projections for the future, and the different directions in which the field is splitting. there is a lot of dichotomy in current work, such as the handmade, diy aesthetic, versus the cleanest minimalism: like the amateur versus professional conflict. this also takes the form of local vs. global, looking towards the past/looking towards the future... on the brighter side, one thing that is no longer a working dichotomy is exploitation/sustainability. we're pretty much unanimously in the sustainability camp by this point (is it too late? i can't handle that question right now). as design gets exponentially more complicated, they mused about how long a design education should take in the future.

the panel was really excellent in letting us see how professionals in different (but related) fields interact with one another, whether it's through chiming in and building and agreeing or respectfully dissenting an opinion while offering constructive middleground to work from in the next moment. they gave us a lot of insight into working collaboratively, and what the world really is like today for working designers. as the talk was winding down, i asked what they wished they had known when they were our age, still in school, just about to jump into the practice. everybody had a really great answer, pretty consistently bordering on the profound... some specific wisdom i absorbed was the fact that working for just yourself, the occupation previously known as freelancing, is not just a backup plan. it can be successful and very rewarding. you don't need to just jump immediately into working, if you can get away with not doing so: we've all got the rest of our lives to work. as young designers, just about to enter the field, we have way more to share with older designers than either of us realize, given our position at the forefront of technologies. and my favourites, which were also some of the last things said: that designers are always students of design, as part of a constantly shifting, roiling, conceptual industry; that it is always, always necessary to keep learning, and lastly: that we should never, ever become professionals.