Reflection on Level 5 Semester B Studio

I find it pleasantly ironic that I'm writing this post on my iPhone as I’m whizzing through space in the Moscow on the day before submission. This entry is meant to discuss the challenges and questions we faced in the studio project for the InsideOut module during the second semester of our Level 5 year. Well, this blog post will be about motivation, prioritization and act as a sort of self-evaluation. If anybody outside the British Higher School of Art and Design ever reads this, especially young designers, I hope it might come as a comfort to find similar thoughts occurring from similar experiences, albeit the different backgrounds and conditions per se.

This is the end of my second degree year and fourth year at the school. Pre-Foundation, Foundation Art & Design, and two years on the Interior Architecture & Design course in Moscow, Russia.  This means that I've been "practicing design" for four years now. Next year is my graduate, degree year and just now I've finished my worst semester out of all four years. It's been the worst both in my project work and in my mental attitude towards what I'm doing. What's more interesting is that it was preceded by my strongest semester. Largely these are internal judgments of my own work, growth, and development, but I think, based on my grades and tutor feedback, that these are more or less accurate classifications of these two semesters.

So how is it that from my strongest, most thorough design and presentation I tumbled down to a project I really would rather not show or talk about? Motivation and prioritization. Yes, it is absolutely true that the strongest motivation comes from within, however, external acknowledgement and reward are extremely important factors in one's ability to "feed" that inner motivation. Human nature. We like to know that our work is worth something. That those endless hours, sleepless nights, stress and tears produced something of value. And, unexpectedly for myself, over these four years I've found that in the academic world -- hours put into a project ARE NOT proportional to the "external acknowledgement", aka grades. And most definitely this DOES NOT mean that one should think that because of this discordance the amount of these work hours should be neglected. In life and professional terms these hours are of immense value. However, the un-proportionate correlation between these hours and academic results makes it very difficult to revive the inner motivation to "keep at it" project after project, since, while you're in school, this is almost the single source of external acknowledgement. So after four years of design, my inner motivation banks were nearly depleted.  I was simply tired of design, the studio, the whole process.  I wasn’t getting the kind of external feedback I might have imagined and all throughout the semester I kept thinking how what I was doing was completely useless.

Perhaps to the "professional reader" this might seem like childish nonsense and sentimental talk that has nothing to do with the way we design. And it doesn't, but it DOES have direct relation to WHY we design. Plus, we've always been encouraged to write about what is important to us, personally, and this semester coming to terms with this fact and figuring out how to deal with it mentally and emotionally was, I'd say, a much bigger challenge than the actual coursework. And in academia there is no system that takes into account one's mental and emotional growth. (Thank God.  Wouldn’t want to be judged on them.)

However, I felt it important to answer and reflect on WHY such a scenario happened.  And what I’ve learned from all this and what I hope to take into the upcoming year and my future in general is the ability prioritize.  And that doesn’t just include time management skills, but also mental prioritization.  Although this project is probably my worst so far, in terms of deliverables, and, consequently, it didn’t get the highest “academic scores”, in terms of long-term life value, understanding these mental and emotional issues is my most significant “learning outcome” for this semester and the biggest “challenge I faced in the studio”. 

Sasha Klose