Prior to attending Loughborough University, I did my undergraduate degree in Industrial Design. During my third year, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in user-centred design. After graduation, I was a UX designer at a start-up company. I have always wanted to study User Experience Design and did lots of self-studying on the job, but I knew I needed to be in a structured environment to enhance my knowledge and skillset.
Whilst I am keen on becoming a socially conscious designer and designing for social impact, I knew that Loughborough University has a fantastic design school. And I saw that the course at Loughborough offered a module on Service Design for Social Innovation and I knew this was the course to go for.
Loughborough University itself was filled with students from diverse backgrounds. Whilst this course was within Loughborough Design, we had lots of students from different disciplines, and I had the fantastic opportunity to work in group projects with various students of different cultures and disciplines. Loughborough Design also had many visitors from industry come and provide insightful lectures. I was especially excited to attend a lecture that was held by a designer from Google who was a previous Loughborough Design graduate! The course itself has inspired me again to be more creative and curious. It has taught me to ‘dig deeper’ and to empathise with our users.
I think my reflective skills have improved greatly whilst studying at Loughborough. Normally after a design project, I would not reflect on it or think about what areas I had done well, what areas could be improved, etc. But being given the capacity to reflect and communicate amongst my course mates has helped me improved.
I found the one-to-one tutorials during some modules to be quite informative as well as the lectures that were prepared for each module. It helped me open a new perspective towards design as well as provided a structured, methodical way for executing my design work.