Week 9

Final outcome

Create an information graphic, or diagram, or animation that, for you, highlights the effective definition and process of a being a design entrepreneur today.

  • Upload your diagram to the Ideas Wall and discuss the pros and cons of how risk, failure and innovation is built into a model for business success
  • What is the impact of different cultural insights with regard to opportunity and potential?

Firstly, I feel that to be a designer in today’s world means that you need to acquire multiple skills – having just one skillset is not enough. We live in a world in 2020 where everything is changing at a rapid rate and we as designers, have to be able to adapt. You need to have knowledge of the working world, and understand how people work too. This is beneficial because if you understand your audience, you can specifically address the problem and provide an effective solution.

Personally, (and from researching this week’s lecture/reference material) I think the following skills are important in entrepreneurship:
• Sustainable – consider process and product impact on the environment
• Communication – effective and efficient to customers/clients/staff
• Strategic thinking – think outside the box, fresh ideas
• Networking skills – being a people person, connect with businesses
• Generalist – good at multiple things in the design world
• Multitasker – able to juggle projects and aid those in need
• Organisation – be organised, time management, preparation/planning
• Resilience – able to bounce back when things go wrong/have backup plans
• Adaptability – learn new situations/environment/software quickly
• Drive – visualise the final outcome and get there
• Creativity – don’t be afraid to experiment and try new ideas
• Continual improvement – always review your progress and learn from it

For my final piece; the idea of walking a tightrope and juggling multiple things has stood out the most from my research, and here are some basic illustrations from google which are sparking some ideas:

  • The tightrope representing a balancing act
  • Maybe the balancing element is a ball that moves?
  • The idea of a bike moving – you are moving along with the business and pedalling keeps you going

12 words is quite a large selection, so I’m going to pick fewer and pick the most important words I feel best represent myself as a potential design entrepreneur:

• Sustainable
• Generalist
• Multitasker
• Resilient
• Adaptable
• Driven
• Creative

Process of final idea… I decided to run with the ‘balancing act’ theme and do building blocks. I also liked how the blocks could be stacked like a paper pile – metaphorically representing all of the things the entrepreneur needs to manage/oversee.
Sketched pencil didn’t provide a crisp enough outline for me so I went back over all of the illustration with the ‘gel’ pen in procreate. I like how this version looks more digitised. Now I just need to edit the words…

I liked the idea of having the skill and talent to be able to balance all of these skills at once, so presented the design entrepreneur as myself, walking on a tightrope.
For the final image I have balanced ‘creative’ separate from all of the other design entrepreneurship qualities. This is because I feel that creativity needs to take a step down when thinking about the foundations of a business. As module 2 has taught me so far, I’ve grown to understand that being a designer is more than being able to design; it’s about developing your entrepreneurial self to become sufficient at a multitude of behind the scenes tasks. I’ve also put ‘creativity’ in red as I feel that fighting that creative urge would be difficult – but you can output it in different ways (such as energy and time put into the business planning).

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