The main goal I set for all of my development throughout the Master's course revolved around the development of my vision and the competency areas most directly related to it (Form & Senses, Communication, Socio-Cultural Awareness).
This goal has been the focus of my development for every semester, supplemented by another more general goal specific for each semester. For the M11 semester, my goal was to develop my identity as a designer, and my personality accordingly, to be able to identify what direction I want to go towards and what kind of work I want to make. For the M12 semester, it was crucial for me to focus more on the development of my academic skills; being able to undertake a design research project, base design decisions on academic reasoning based on literature, etc.
For this graduation year, the final year before heading into my professional career, the goal I set at the start of the M21 semester is fully to turn my work and my name as a designer outwards from the department.
On a superficial level, this means exposing my name and work to the outside world in order to get exposure for my work as well as gaining contacts that could be valuable at the start of my professional career. I was fortunate enough to have two opportunities for this at the start of the year. I was asked to show my "Implied by Light" M11 project at the Liberation of Light expo in Moscow through Openlight. Furthermore, I was selected as one of the HOT100 by Dutch new-media institute Virtueel Platform. The HOT100 are a yearly selection of "the most talented alumni of design, art and media educations in The Netherlands" for which the Virtueel Platform organizes a "who is who" publication and a day of workshops/lectures.
Both these opportunities were not particularly profound, but quickly made me realize that this goal of exposing my name and work outwards encompasses much more than it might suggest at a superficial first glance. It required me to start thinking about my identity as a designer and the way I communicate this on a whole different level: How does one communicate the conceptual depth behind a design to a non-expert audience? Or how do I want to present my own biography, or vision on design, to a different audience than that at TU/e?
This experience was interesting and exciting, and proved to be a precedent for many of the learning experiences I had this semester that have developed through opportunities that arose out of setting this goal. It meant I had to rephrase the goal to the development of my professional competencies to be able to work as a (independent) designer.
Working towards this goal, I came to realize even more than I did before, that a great deal of being a designer revolves around communication; not only communication through a design or selling it to an audience as I had focussed on during my earlier years, but also communication of your identity to outsiders, of a project's content towards clients or amongst colleagues in a design company or towards the press.