Professional Orientation: Reflections on the Unit

Studying “Professional Orientation: Design” in my final year of my degree has been a very strange experience. By no means has it been unpleasant but has felt unnecessary at times. Due to getting my entrance into the University of Canberra through prior study of a Diploma of Industrial Design at TAFE Newcastle, I gained credits for many of the first-year design units with the exception of this one, and had I chosen to study it in my second year, I would have taken a year longer to graduate due to pre-requisite and co-requisite courses.  Some of the content has seemed painfully obvious, such as professional ethics and the importance of time management, and the assessments seem more relevant or at least dependent on visual communication skills as opposed to interaction or industrial design skills, such as the strong emphasis on laying out documentation in Adobe InDesign or as an Infographic, but agree that it would be hard to make it more general or to provide an option that was able to develop someone’s Industrial Design skills. I do enjoy learning design theory but I think this unit makes more sense in context when taught alongside “Principles of Typography and Layout” and “Introduction to Interaction and User Centred Design” which I studied in my first semester of second year.

I am glad to have studied this unit as yes, my prior study at TAFE did not have much content on the requirements of actual professional practice or a focused unit to develop this aspect of design thinking, but I think the general culture of design education encourages working this way anyway. On the other hand, some aspects of this class seemed like they came straight out of a high-school PDHPE curriculum like all the personality quizzes and goal-setting activities.

This Website forms the final assessment item for this unit, and yet again, I think this unit is more geared towards Visual Communication or User Interaction. The assessment requires the portfolio to contain two completed projects from 2021 which is fine if you’re someone who designs for print or the web and can produce many projects quickly, but making physical products takes time. I am mostly content with my assessment results for the other two, the Creative Response less so, as I think some of the marking criteria aren’t as relevant when talking about designing physical objects as opposed to graphics or digital systems. I think my most effective method of communication is written, however true that may be, and have a tendency to overuse text in visual presentations, but I don’t have a good way to work around this yet. I find it really annoying that the supporting documentation needs to be laid out graphically and is worth 10% of the mark for the website, and I really don’t think a SWOT analysis of different web platforms is all that relevant or even a good way of making a decision on what platform to use.

This semester has been difficult, as even though I reduced my work hours down from 40 to 30, I’m still struggling to balance work and uni, and I was hoping that by taking a few courses that required relatively less contact time on campus I’d be able to do better. Hopefully I can stop working until 2AM for 3 nights a week by next semester and use my evenings more productively.