Hello everyone!
I'm an undergraduate senior wishing to apply for Masters in (Graphic) Design and/or in Global Innovative Design. Below is my first draft of the general Statement of Purpose (aka no info about the grad schools). Any feedbacks are greatly appreciated! Thank you.
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I had always thought how great it would be if limitations do not exist. This thought prompted me to learn English and travel 8844 miles away from home to attend one of the most open-minded universities in the United States. Here, I mastered three languages, penned papers about the queer community in Japan, and discussed racial and political issues that were said to be risky conversing about as a foreigner. It was great. Some of my best in-between classes and activities moments, however, were spent freelancing on the website 99designs, where designers submit competing designs in response to a customer's design brief. In the midst of my liberal education, I came to realize that I wanted to become a designer.
Limitation fascinates me-so much that I spent my undergraduate years scrutinizing it. Indeed, economics is the study of how societies and individuals make choices on allocating scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants-or simply put, how people manage within their limitations.
I believe designers are economists, in a sense that they also have to work within their tools and means to achieve a certain goal. There are the clients, who have all the resources, and then there are the designers, who would help the clients come up with better solutions to organizing these resources. Moreover, even when the designers already have these beautiful design ideas in their heads, there are fu---rther limitations such as budget or regulations that they have to deal with. Therefore, design is an economical practice that stimulates my intellectual and aesthetic curiosities.
Thanks to Brown University's open curriculum and location, I got a chance to take graphic design classes, including Typography and Color, in Rhode Island School of Design. One thing I learned from design that I could not completely grasp while studying economics is that sometimes, limitations are beneficial. For example, my Typography II professor, Lucinda Hitchcock, gave us an assignment in which we were limited to a combination of two fonts to typeset a quote. There were eight parts-each had a different parameter that we could vary, such as leading, size, and so on. These limitations had forced me to contemplate on each and every design choice, and also pushed me through times when I thought my creative juices had been parched. Finally, ideas sprung to surface: I crafted typographic compositions I didn't think I could that delivered the understanding of the quote. The limitations given by my professor, in this case, acted as a guide and a catalyst for creativity that in turns exceeds my preceding expectations.
I have learned a few important things from that assignment as well as during the past years as an undergraduate. I learned, from typesetting the quote, of my interests in using typography as a functional tool to effectively convey messages. As product designer Dieter Rams once said: "Design should be as discreet as an English butler," I found typography most beautiful when it evokes responses not by the type appearance itself, but by how typography clearly communicates content while tactfully guiding the audience in its own manner. I also learned, from hours of reading design blogs, freelancing for the website 99designs and learning to code the front end of an interactive web application, that the act of creating something gives me a strong sense of accomplishment. Last but not least, I learned that, when there are no more given limitations, I could personally and deliberately set my own limits to aid in crystalizing my intent.
Therefore, I set a limit-a goal-for my graduate education pursuit. I want to focus on design that bridges the discrepancy between complex systems, data, innovations and people. The type of design that acts like Beatrice Warde's Crystal Goblet or Dieter Rams's English butler, who would present matter in such a way that is accessible and comprehensible for a normal person. I would like to remind those very important and complex intellectuals-economists, scientists, engineers, policy makers, etc.-that, while dealing with big issues like health care or cloud storage or the legitimacy of prostitution, the centrality is always human beings. In other words, I want to lift people's limitation of access through design, like how I had lifted mine through learning languages and studying abroad. This is because I believe good designers should never forget human beings. After all, design is never just about the creator and the creation, but the intimacy sparked between the creation and the audience.
[A paragraph about the grad school and its program]
Setting a limit does not mean my dreams have disappeared or shifted in scope. As I've come to know myself better, they have become more unified, with a clearer sense of purpose. Beneath the travels that have taken me to the U.S., the curiosity that caused me to study economics, the creative vigor that fueled my search for typographic solutions, is the desire to share with people a world I've found to be unimaginably intriguing and beautiful.
