So I've recently enrolled to commence an MA in Service Design at the Royal College of Art. Previous home to Dyson, Heatherwick, Hockney and some others of note. There are a few reasons taking this decision which I thought I'd get written down, as much as a statement of intent for myself as anything else. Interstingly a significant amount of them regard stuff I've had floating and around in my head for a while now which I'll reference back to.
concentration
I've wriiten specifically about this before. And I've been trying to split the time I concentrate on commercial work with the time I spend on personal work for a year or so now. But one learning I've found from that is that I find it hard to draw out that concentration through personal projects. I tend to solve things conceptually, sometime build a working prototype, then park it up to start the next thing. I'm hoping that in spending two years studying at an institution like the RCA with a talented peer group and support staff I'll push my levels of concentration a lot further. I'll be due to put in a decent dissertation (possibly on informal economy or metamorphosis stuff) + show a major final project in the summer of 2015 as part of the highly regarded RCA Show so that alone is going to force me to get something a bit more rohbust out the door.
motivation
I recently joined a gym for the first time in my life (It's a great little gym and was designed by the chap that designed the Hacinenda, so I can pretend I'm raving in the 90's whilst excercising, a lot of the time I am raving). Anyway one thing I found while going to the gym was that I excercise far my more effectively if I join in a class or hang out with a personal trainer than I do if I do my own thing. I'm sure this is true for most people, it's that motivation thing, not wanting to let others down. Again something I've written about in the past. In short I see a move to the RCA as the move from training on my own to training with others, and I'm hoping the resulting output mightl be the same.
commas & punctuation
I've always liked commas, they lead to other things rather than just stopping things, like full stops do. And I've always thought a job description/obituary with lots of comas makes for an interesting read. So I'll be adding another coma to my own for the next couple of years, that of student. And adding a bit more punctation into my life.
a post digital career
I'm kind of getting bored of social media campaigns and digital comms now. I want to shift my positioning a step away from digital, whilst still drawing upon that experience. Get closer to business (the MA includes completing 15% of Imperial's MBA programme) and purpose. And hopefully get ambigious, sketch more, digest stuff, and hopefully fail a bit to.
the product is the service is the marketing
Finally I stole this off of Russell's recent blog post, a very timely piece of writing in my view. Again it is something that I've had in my head for a while and had some good discussions about with Asi about last year. One of the most astute observations I heard about innocent while i was there was that there success was simply down to 'taking a really good service industry mentality to the FMCG sector'. An increasing amount of the client work I was/am looking at regarded service, and it became more and more obvious that an investment in the quality of that service would inturn be a direct investment in the clients product (the bit they make thier money out of) and marketing (the bit that gets and keeps that money coming in). I'm of a strong belief that it's this bit of business that is going to see significant growth, is going to have a more than significant level of demand for it's associated skills, and probably most importantly is going to effect the society and world we live in to the most significant degree. I don't think it's going to easy though, it's very possible though as the GDS team have shown in their success with gov.uk. A lot of sectors are going to need to go through that same level of thinking, planning and heavy lifting to come out the other side better for it though. That's the bit I want to start getting good at.
So here's to being a student again for the first time in fifteen years.
Sounds great, Ted. Congratulations. I know Nick Leon and the course and I it's very exciting.
Thanks for mentioning GDS too.
Posted by: Benterrett | May 09, 2013 at 01:20 PM