The push

Have you ever set a goal for yourself that seemed impossible to achieve? Maybe it was buying a house, getting a promotion at work, or learning a new skill.

Whatever it was, you probably felt a mix of excitement and fear at the thought of pursing it. I know I have.

But here is the thing: pushing ourselves to achieve our goals is what makes life exciting and fulfilling. It’s what gives us purpose and helps us grow as individuals. And while it is not always easy, the rewards are well worth the effort.

The reality

First, it is crucial to know what you want to achieve. Set the goal. Write in a paper what you want to achieve and make some research into ways of achieving it. What are you lacking? Don’t worry if you don’t know, it will become clear while you follow the process.

When I came to London a few years ago and started applying for jobs, I was unable to get anything at all. I realised among others, one crucial thing I lacked was design experience in this country, or some accreditation that could build trust with employers.

I had some Spanish friends who had studied here, and I knew it helped them to get into the market. Based on that, I made my search into UX design courses. I studied art and graphic design in Spain, but once in the work environment I found myself drawn to the UX side of things. I was captivated with the UX design processes, understand humans and try to make our online journey as smooth as possible, I love that.

There were plenty of courses, some lengthy and costly. I wanted something short, with accreditations and the possibility of gaining work experience in England.

Doing a master’s degree seemed like a promising idea as some last for a year, but the cost was prohibitive. I researched and discovered that the government offers loans. I fitted the criteria, so I applied.

Prior to that, I realised to be accepted at the university I had to pass the ILS (International English Language Testing System) with a 6.5 and translate my Spanish titles into English. All this involved money, but I was already working in other fields such as waitress, sales assistant, or babysitting to help pay my way until I could land my dream job.

The first time, I failed the ILS with a 6 so I had to re-do it and wait to enrol in September instead of January as I originally planned. However, this didn’t deter me and only made me focus harder. Finally, I was accepted and sustained by the government loan.

As per the above example, it doesn’t mean achieving our goals is going to be a smooth ride. Obstacles are inevitable and can be discouraging. However, it is important to remember that obstacles are just temporary setbacks and with perseverance, resilience, and a forward-thinking mindset, we can overcome them.

As you could read, when I came to the UK, I was working towards my goal of finding a job within my field, design. I encountered several obstacles along the way, including the lack of experience as I described previously or change of language, among others. I refused to give up and instead, I thought about a training plan. Nevertheless, I was able to cross the finish line of my first challenge by studying at Kingston University (London) for a master’s degree in UX design using a government loan. I was hired as a UX designer for a project as part of the university. This was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life and provided me with the key to unlocking my future career.

The motivation

Getting there is great but staying motivated is as important as achieving the goal and one way to stay motivated is by tracking the progress. In my case, this was done by keeping a record of all the interviews and exams I failed as well as the ones I passed over time. This allows me to see how far I’ve come and gives me a sense of accomplishment. We will keep facing difficulties but celebrating the small wins usually is a good strategy to maintain a positive attitude and keep moving forward.

It’s important to remember that what works for one person may not work for another. That’s why it’s essential to find what works best for us individually. Whether it’s focusing on a progress track, creating a vision picture, or finding an accountability partner, there are many strategies we can use to stay motivated. The key is to stay committed and never give up on ourselves.

The outcome

Even the famous Allen Saunders quote says:

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,”

Yes, let life happens. Explore how obstacles can be overcome with perseverance and a forward mindset.

Keep focused on your goals and strive to achieve them! I like to think that the process of reaching a goal is no different from solving a problem. Though I was unaware of it at the time, I was already using the design thinking process as most of us do many times whether we know it or not: empathise, define what I wanted to accomplish and possible ways, ideate and create possibilities.

My call to action for you is to set a specific goal for yourself and commit to a plan of action. As the famous quote goes,

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Let’s continue to push ourselves to reach our full potential and achieve our goals.

Did you enjoy my story, and did anything resonate with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below or message me on LinkedIn.

Making the impossible possible was originally published in Kingfisher Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In January this year, I attended Interfacing The Future 2023: Blurring the Divide — Hosted by Conjure.

It was a live event at Barbican Centre that gave us access to transformative business trends, proactive conversations, and key actionable takeaways that the future will appreciate.

Interfacing the future is a yearly event and the goal is to improve the way we interact with technology, to make it more intuitive and user-friendly, and to unlock new capabilities and possibilities for how we use technology in our daily lives.

The theme of this year “Blurring the Divide” was all about the technology + and human collaboration debate. How “well used” technology, more concrete Artificial Intelligence, could help enhance the human experience.

There was a panel of 4 speakers that left clear the versatility of AI showing how it could be applied from digital art, healthcare, banking to death technology.

The Artificial Intelligence debates

Having in mind that the key highlights for this event have been already shared by Conjure team I am going to give you my personal view around the subject of the talks : Artificial Intelligence.

AI constitutes the basis for a big technological revolution that as many others have its pros and cons, and as happens with anything in general in life, all will depend on its use.

Still there is a lot to uncover in terms of ethicality, rights, and privacy to make the technology work in its fullest and in our favour rather than against us. Those was also the main concerns shared amount talks.

All the 4 talks were equally interesting, but I decided to focus in 2 of them: “Ai in healthcare” and “The future of AI in generative Media”.

AI in Healthcare

“Ai in healthcare” was the one communicated through the voice of Roushanak Rahmat the AI researcher scientist of Elekta a cancer-oriented radiotherapy company.

I considered it as the talk that could bring a live value. The possibility of living more years and avoid certain lethal diseases. She wanted us to first understand well the context so started by showing the cancer radiotherapy process in layman’s terms, and it really set the basis to empathise and better understand the problems.

The main topic of the conversation was around the problems they are facing in healthcare having to analyse big data bases and image segmentation accuracy when radiate a tumour and how AI could help in so.

The part I found more interesting was when Roushanak talked about our differences as humans from birth, physical complexion, diet to environment and how due to so the trail/error current medical procedures are not successful for all.

I completely agree that AI would be of a big help analysing all the data and potentially providing early diagnosis and personalised medicine as was said in the talk, but the problem still lingers in how to tackle the potential privacy breach, as well as, for example using an AI robot to help with radiation to remove a tumour, how to be sure the technology is going to do what we mean for it to do all the time. We do not want to eradicate the cancer by killing the human if not by removing the tumour. The calibration of the technology must be precise enough to achieve what we want, or who knows maybe only smart enough to help the human rather than to replace it.

The future of AI and generative Media

“The future of AI and generative Media” communicated via Tom Manson the CTO of Stability AI. It is the one I found more controversial and a trigger to open the debate between the potential of AI and the technical challenge of how to design/create AI that will be ethically used as well as will do only what we meant it to do. It is a less sensitive case since it does not involve humans lives as the healthcare one does, but it still opens the debate of regulations and how to balance the freedom of having an open-source code that can evolve at a fast pace at the cost of having people that will use it for non-ethical reasons.

The first thought that seems to come to mind is about applying some set of regulations which usually means for the API to become a private paid one and with it removing all the benefits of fast evolution given by sharing the code with everyone, or limit the data that is entering into the tool which will damage the potential use of the tool, we could not search for all the possible images and it will limit our potential creativity.

So far, it seems the solution needs some compromise. And then the question here comes to is fast evolution what we need or safe evolution?

It’s great to be able to give freedom and rely in humans good will unfortunately or simple human nature, some people already started to use it in the “wrong way” so it might mean the technology has more power than the one as a society we can handle.

We might need an ethics or conduct test before we can use it. I do not believe in privatisation, but we might need to apply some sort of registration area where before anyone can register to use the API it has to first pass a test about ethics as not sure if what we need to regulate is the technology or the human but to me in this case it seems the human.

Aside its ethical issues this type of technology could bring a lot of value for us, as Product Designers allowing us more space to create while leaving the repetitive part to the machine. This will accelerate production as well as pixel perfect accuracy.

I believe AI technology is a great discovery if we can manage to maintain it as a collaborative tool to ease our burdens, rather than one to replace us.

My takeaways

I found the event useful to talk though challenges, where we see the future going and much more. It was also a good opportunity to talk with the speakers or other designers and understand more about what they do.

I heard in May Conjure will be kicking off another event this at the Delaunay in Covent Garden, dates to be confirmed, but I’m planning to attend.

I highly recommend these events by Conjure, watch out for the next one!

Did you attend Interfacing the Future: 2023? What are your predictions around how design and digital can use AI as a tool to help our industry? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below or message me on LinkedIn.

Interfacing The Future 2023: Blurring the Divide was originally published in Kingfisher Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I started this article thinking “I want it to be about designing for internal platforms” firstly, because I am currently designing for one and I wanted to share what I have learnt from my experience, and second because I consider there is lot of writing about customer-facing applications and software but too little about the software that is behind the scenes managing the former.

While writing the article I realised the message I was trying to convey was not about a practical guide on how to design for internal platforms or even write about the differences between internal or external platforms, it was about the common problems we all can face as a designer when working for a corporation. That was what made me reframe the article to designing in the theory versus designing in the practice.

For whom we design

I would like to make one concept clear before jumping into the core section of this article, my experience. It is for whom we design. We design for the user, but who is that user?

The concept of user is getting properly engrained in people’s minds, but often it can be misunderstood as the theory usually talks about the end user as the one that brings the revenue, for example in ecommerce we would typically expect that to be the customer.

This does not seem a specific case where the theory is wrong more a case where the theory does not go deep enough, or that we just touch the surface.

Every person that is part of the purchase process, and it does not matter if it is the one that brings the revenue or the one that manages the systems to make that revenue possible, all are users. Based on that we have as user: the people who are selling, implementing, managing tools performance, supporting customers to achieve their goals as well as the customer itself, all as users with needs and requirements for us to think about.

Depending on what we are designing, internal or external platform we will have one or the other, but still, we will have those users to contrast design decisions against if we have the capabilities and if not will explain more about it in the next section with examples.

My experience at Kingfisher

Now, I am going to share the things that resonate to me while working here at Kingfisher as a Product Designer for an internal management platform in charge of monitoring the kitchen, bathroom and storage design projects that customers are creating in B&Q. I will try to relate what as designers we are taught to do, to how it often works in actual business and how we can solve that barrier.

The first thing I learnt is that not everything is as per the manual, and that does not necessarily need to be bad. With this I mean, when we learn user experience design the main lesson is that it is all about the user, what the user wants (which is not always what they need… this can be for another article) and how to make their journey as smooth as possible. Yes, all that is true, but up to a certain extent.

We are working for a company with its budgets, priorities, and scope. It does not matter whether we have the most brilliant and innovative feature if it is never going to be developed as it will never reach the users. This can feel frustrating, but it is when we must learn to ponder well the business needs with the users’ needs, and this helped me to boost creativity and thinking out of the box as yes, we always want to strive for the most optimised user experience but sometimes we might need to be more flexible than what we would like to.

It’s like when you are cooking a recipe, you might not have a particular ingredient or even the budget to buy it, but you still can find the way of making the recipe tasty by adding other similar ingredient or improvising and using your creativity to achieve something “good”, something that will be easy to use for the user with what we have.

Second thing I learnt is, even if not ideal, we might not always have the capability of testing with the user and when that happens, we still must be able to solve, in that case we can use best practices and common sense. The process of design is iterative which means if we can’t achieve all that we want in first iteration we can always come back to it later. For this to happen it is crucial to monitor what is developed, so even though we might not have capabilities to test initially we now can track performance and learn from it.

My conclusion

It is not about the product itself, even, if we can acknowledge that customer facing platforms and internal ones can have some disparities, mainly dictated by their nature. An internal management platform is a control tool where we should cater for automation when possible and easy fast data storage while the customer- facing one is usually a trading platform. Out of that main functionalities stated for each one, the rest from a design point of view are mainly similitudes, since both have their users and set of design practices to follow.

As the subject of this article states the main problems we usually face as designers at least in these cases are as strategic as they are design related. How to balance the user needs with the business needs. Sometimes it can feel like we are compromising our design skills, but we are not, we are using our creativity and learning to make the most out of what we have been presented with. Is that not that what design is? Solving problems.

Do you face similar challenges in balancing user needs with business goals? Have you experienced inefficiencies between theory and reality in product design? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below or message me on LinkedIn.

Designing in the theory versus design in the practice was originally published in Kingfisher Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.