Secrets

I won’t say my mid-term critique for thesis went great – but the committee was helpful. I am far away from my starting point and close at the same time.

I would like to tell a little secret now:

I was hired at C2 twice. The first time was a little more then two years ago. I accepted the position, but called back the next day after I was offered another position that paid more and was fewer hours. It was a hard decision to make as C2 seemed to combine business and design together in a way I didn’t know existed.

By the time school started I knew I had made a mistake. Not because the job I had taken was bad, but because I realized there were things I could learn at C2 that I wasn’t sure I could learn anywhere else. So when a friend let me know that his internship at C2 had ended and they were looking for someone new I asked if he would put in a good word for me.

I went through the agonizing process of trying to decide when and if I should tell C2 that they had hired me before. Even though it was a small company and I was interviewed by some of the same people who interviewed me the first time, they didn’t remember me and I didn’t exactly tell them. It didn’t come out until about four weeks after my internship started – not a fact that I am proud of. But I am grateful that they didn’t throw me out on my ass. It was embarrassing but in the end worth the risk.

I have heard several times now from my professors that maybe if I had worked at some other firm, I wouldn’t be doing my thesis on this subject. The reason I wrote about it is because my thesis topic wasn’t dictated by the random chance of me working at C2. Rather it was a conscious decision I took to inform myself about the options I had when I got out into the work force.

When I was in college the first time I didn’t realize how important it was that I take steps to educated myself beyond what I was learning at school until it was too late. I promised myself I wouldn’t make that mistake again. So now I am in a quest to figure out what I’ve got myself into and to find a way to combine my education and skills into a job. If I could help broaden someone else’s horizon what a great bonus it would be.

spinning my wheels

I’ve been so frustrated working on my thesis. Last week after class, I came home and sat down to read a blog CPH127 that is devoted to an “open dialogue around the profound understanding of design, leadership and innovation.” Why? because I was encouraged to promote my own blog by provoking a dialog by poking fun of firms who are using design and design thinking to solve business problems that are identified and unidentified. How? Many of these firms are using the same jargon in their mission statements. They all talk about “strategy,” “innovation,” and “creativity” and I was encouraged to point this out in more explicit terms then I am doing here.

Honestly, I was hoping to find a way out of poking fun. This is not to say that under the right circumstances I wouldn’t poke fun. Last semester I made my leave-behind a book about shameless self-promotion and used celebrities, current and former, as the butt of my joke. But here it did not seem kosher. (For your viewing pleasure, and my chance to promote myself… pdf).

Last week I wasn’t so sure about the whole thing. I didn’t, and still don’t to some extent, feel comfortable with designers running around saying they can fix business problems when many of them have little or no background in business except for the companies that they run (which is no small feat). But there are movements out there to change this. See NextD.

In the end my explorations brought me back to my original point, which was that I was interested in creating a business model. Right now in my head it is an animated website.

Wish me luck.