Graduate / It's a world that we have designed to suit our needs; SoP for M.Sc. product design [6]

Please take a look and tell me where i can change what. I have an undergraduate degree in communicationd design but i want to pursue a postgrad degree in product design .. apart from my portfolio, this is all i have.

Help!

Studying art and design during my undergraduate years has enhanced my well founded desire to understand and then fabricate a part of the world around us. It's a world that we have designed to suit our needs, and one that we will have to continue to enhance at the most fundamental levels, so as to assure our future lifestyles are safer, smarter, more efficient, more comfortable and more durable. Even in its broadest sense, the design process does just that. It's a process that seeks out inefficiencies within a system or communication and focuses upon designing or redesigning an ideal solution, minimizing negative impacts, maximizing quality and efficiency, while making sure the solution is aesthetic and commercially viable.

Although my academic design knowledge has been focused on the fields of communication design, media and art, I have always been a spatial and practical learner. Science was my chosen area of study at the school level, and it was an undergraduate degree in architecture that I once wanted to pursue. However, it wasn't until the commencement of my undergraduate design studies 4 years ago, that I myself began to recognize my artistic abilities and my then budding love for the arts. Since then, design and other expressive art forms ï namely theater, film, fine and graphic art, photography and music ï have been at the core of my personal and academic development. Though I shifted course along the way, I today feel like I have only taken a different route to the same goal, which was always in mental sight.

I see the study of product design as the ideal way to combine my interest in 3 dimensional and spatial form with my background in design. The M.Sc. in Advanced Product Design program at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, is an idyllic opportunity to enhance my spatial and technical abilities and to learn the techniques, process and professional tools essential to a designer in today's competitive and fast paced world. This course is one of the few that would allow me to make up for my lack of present academic technical knowledge and thus open new doors, allowing me to pursue a career in the direction of my passion while honing my abilities. Studying at the UWIC would also give me an exposure to an international system and body of people, from whom there would be much to learn and collaborate upon. Overall, it would be an exciting and challenging experience through which I would definitely gain much academically, professionally, socially and personally - learn a few new things about myself.

It is also exciting to me that the course entails holistic and epistemological development. This is in accordance with my strong personal belief that knowledge is everything and, what we are is essentially what we know. Product design allows for us to take our knowledge of the world and create workable and viable solutions to problems with it in a variety of ways. I believe that this allows for creativity and individuality while also placing on the designer the responsibility of creating a piece of work that is not just functional and aesthetic but equally sustainable and ethical. As we move from an age of scientific discovery to an age of scientific mastery, I'd like to be a part of making our technology more efficient, more user-friendly and more available to the common man.

My past work and internship experiences have been in the fields of advertising, graphic and web design as well as branding and marketing. Today's product designer would need not only the abilities to conceptualize and manufacture a product but also the need to effectively package, brand, create an identity and market a product to the right segment of people. My study at UWIC would teach me the technical skills and train my spatial thought process, while allowing me to share my ideas and give input in terms of the latter half of the process, namely communication design, branding and advertising, among students from more technical backgrounds. During my study, I would aim to use my skills of sketching, drawing, photography, art and other computer generated design in collaboration with the new techniques that I acquire, such that each skill augments the other and truly original, innovative and skilled work can be achieved.

Before choosing a specific area of research, I would like to understand the product design process itself more thoroughly. Studying at UWIC would allow me to do this, and rapidly, with an exposure to the latest technology, research methods, development work and access to an inexhaustible knowledge base. I see this course as the perfect opportunity to combine my skills and background in art with my interest in spatial and technical design. It would be an opportunity best made use of.