Admission essay for master's program in media design

Admissions Essay

Statement of Purpose

The Graduate School of Media and Design represents the next level for me in terms of my career development. I have had the opportunity to work in design, and enjoyed some modest success, but wish to pursue formal studies that will allow me to learn my field at a higher level. While I have a good eye, I want to understand at a deeper level the theories that drive design of major consumer products in particular.

Design is all around us, in every product we see, from the buildings we live it to the tools we use in our daily lives. The combination of form and function fascinates me. In my experience working in marketing I have mostly created visuals for promotional purposes, but my heart lies in product design. To be able to understand some of the more complex aspects of design – the engineering components, how to make something both beautiful and functional at the same time, is what drives me to enter this program.

I know that I will not learn it all here. I also know that even a lifelong learner has to get a foundational knowledge in the field in order to build up one\\\\\\\'s body of knowledge. This is my noble pursuit. I want to understand the process of innovation. I feel that the comprehensive nature of the program offers a tremendous foundation on which I can build my dreams.

In particular, the attention to the different aspects of design appeals to me. I intend to pursue the design track, but also to gain some grounding on the technology and management aspects of design in particular. Great products are those that fill a need, and a great project needs to be something that can be sold to the market. Technology plays such a critical role in design today – while I have a soft spot for old school methods, I understand that all design work in done on computers, and understanding the deeper integration of technology in design will help my design work tremendously. I firmly believe in the value of a multidisciplinary approach to learning, and that is one of the big appeals to the Graduate School of Media and Design for me.

Upon graduation, I will pursue a career in product design. The last year or so in particular I have found myself focusing on product design, sketching out concepts for products, and thinking about what makes the perfect balance between engineering, end user needs and design elements. The idea that something can look like a simple design but is actually highly complex, balancing different needs, elevates design to art, or beyond.

Innovation is what drives society, and design plays a big role in innovation. The products that we use most in our lives, they are all the result of innovation that introduced the idea, somebody who put together a successful marketing campaign with packaging, and the evolution of product design. Nothing looks like it did when it was first launched, and that is the result of successful iterations of the product design process, where feedback in applied to an initial innovation to make it better.

It is with this profound sense of purpose that I am applying to enter the Graduate School of Media and Design. After graduation, I will pursue my passion for product design, and become a leader in the field, representing the School well in the subsequent years. My admiration for great design has become my inspiration for my life\\\\\\\'s path, and I look forward to starting the next step by augmenting my knowledge with the intensive education and training that I will receive at the Graduate School of Median and Design.

Question .

All of these areas fascinate me, but my heart is in design. Each track represents an innovation pathway. Technological change opens up tremendous opportunities. Think about blockchain for a moment. It was developed to facilitate cryptocurrency, but at the end of the day we are just getting started exploring the different uses for blockchain There is an incredible amount of untapped potential there. That new technology is going to drive successful waves of innovation as people start to understand the full breadth and depth of its capabilities, and as people think of new uses for it. The same thing can be said for artificial intelligence. The innovations are almost endless, and technological innovations such as these will completely transform our lives, to the point where people living at the end of the 21st century will barely even recognize life at the beginning of it.

Management and Policy are great tracks for understanding the mechanisms of innovation – how it is financed, how it is dispersed to the world at large, and things like that. It\\\\\\\'s important for any innovator, especially an entrepreneur, to understand how management and policy facilitates innovation, what those drivers are.

But design is where my heart is. Design is one of the central elements that makes something attractive to people, and attractiveness can play an important role in whether an innovation succeeds or not. There are many examples of innovations that had poor design in the beginning. Those innovations either failed or they had to improve on the design side.

I look at the smartphone as an example, perhaps the classic one of our age, where design fuels innovation. The smartphone started as technology-driven innovation. It was the feature-rich nature of the smartphone that spurred initial uptake. But design matters, too. By making phones look sleek and beautiful, and by finding ways to seamlessly incorporate multiple features, the smartphone for a while was the single most innovative product. New features were being built into them all the time, and designers were creating applications to leverage these features. Nobody even uses their phone to make phone calls anymore, and that\\\\\\\'s a transformation that has occurred within a decade. But it started with having a product that was small enough to fit in a pocket or purse, big enough to type on the screen, and was still able to fit a camera and headphone jack (RIP, headphone jack). All of a sudden everybody had a sleek, portable camera, music player that could go online, and that was transformation for our society.

This is why design inspires me. Our world becomes more beautiful, products become more successful, and at the end of the day these are both beneficial things. I look at the future of design – finding ways to transform our energy and transportation systems. That will require technological leaps, yes, but design will play a critical role in making such transformations easier. I think about what self-driving cars will look like. They look like regular cars today, but they won\\\\\\\'t in the future. They will be electric boxes. The interior will be built for whatever functions people want to perform while riding (sleeping, eating, etc.) and the exterior built for fitting the most number of vehicles on our roads safety. A combination of ergonomics, function and aesthetics.

Design plays an absolutely critical role in innovation, and this link is what I will explore in my studies, along with foundational courses on the roles that technology, management and innovation play, but design is my passion and that\\\\\\\'s where my focus will lie.

Question 2. My answer to Question 1 highlights an innovation that I have spent quite bit of time thinking about – the self-driving car. Once freed from the burden of actually operating the vehicle one is traveling in, the possibilities are nearly endless. We will all be passengers soon. So what will the interior of a car look like? It could look like the back of a limo, but more likely people will want to pursue a range of activities in their vehicles. There will be this trade-off between the most efficient design, which is just bigger than the person in the vehicle and would be the most efficient in terms of transportation. But people are going to want to be able to do things. On their way to work in the morning, they might want to shave, put their makeup on, make coffee, surf the web, those sorts of activities. On their way home from work, maybe they\\\\\\\'d want to drink a beer, or take a nap. Their bosses might want them to keep working. I think that there are a lot of directions innovation can take the self-driving car, but there is no reason whatsoever that these vehicles will look anything like the car of today, which is designed around this core function of actually driving.

The exterior offers a lot of possibilities as well, and I\\\\\\\'ve been thinking about that. Of course, cars with great design always win in the marketplace, and the traditional form vs function trade-off will still exist because these are still going to be expensive for many people. But you won\\\\\\\'t need windows because you won\\\\\\\'t need to see out of the vehicle – windows that can turn to black for sleeping, or into movie screens, are absolutely going to happen. If the vehicle is electric, that removes the critical exterior structure component – a personal self-driving vehicle can be quite tiny. People might want a big vehicle but urban planners might want to orient people towards smaller ones.

I am fascinated by emerging technologies and the transformational possibilities that they offer, and the role that design plays in that. As I mentioned in my discussion of smartphones, design elements created the conditions for tremendous innovation and in just ten years those innovations have completely transformed us. The same will happen with self-driving cars. People will commute from anywhere – if you\\\\\\\'re still sleeping on your way to work, you can spend more time getting there, for example, and you\\\\\\\'re not stressed out in traffic. The way we build our communities will change.