Study 34

what do you love about design? i love the freedom and creativity it allows, the variety that it gives you and the thoughts it provokes about our environment and how we interact with it. what drove me to study design was the excitement an idea can spark, the technical challenges you have to negotiate, the fear of failure you must overcome and ultimately, the deep sense of achievement that comes with succeeding in all these things. when i left university to work in the fashion industry, i found my time taken up with unproductive meetings, worrying if i’d sufficiently analysed the latest catwalk offering for ideas to ‘imitate’ and whether a last-minute design would make it to an already overstretched factory. it was a long way from what i had envisioned and had worked so hard to get to. waste was one of the biggest shocks i encountered. and by waste i don’t just mean resources and raw materials, important though they are, but also money and time. communication between departments se