I am a Designer

  • May 2013

I wrote this proposal back in 2011 to apply for ‘Designers Creativity Workshops: Heuristic Methods For Design‘ led by designer Alexandra Antonopoulou. I was asked to write a one A4 piece on why I see myself as a designer and what I think of design. And here is what I have written back then:

I am a photographer, artist and Information Technology engineer. Visual design is the vehicle through which my work reaches out and gets transformed to a meaningful concept to the public. It is through design that my images assimilate a narrative and form a story.

As an artist who uses photographs, design plays a big role from the early stages of the process until it is release to the public. The planning of a photographic idea or project as in what to photograph and how to photograph, composing images in which I decide what to include and what to exclude from the frame, all the way to the final dissemination of work, whether in an exhibition, book or online. All these processes require in one form or another, design. In other words, photographs are never the end product, as Nicolas Bourriaud writes in Postproduction, “the contemporary work of art does not position itself as the termination point of the ‘creative process’ (a ‘finished product’ to be contemplated) but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities”. That is, what is done with the photographs is what makes them effective and meaningful, and this is where design plays a significant role.

In addition to the above. I have a moderate graphic design experience, which include designing photography books (see Xavier Pick exhibition book and Worth Unlimited project in the attached CV), designing flyers for events, as well as designing my own website.

I also believe that design is not restricted to art. Having studied and worked in engineering, I learnt to appreciate how much a good design can enhance, not only the aesthetic of a device but also deep inside, how it functions and operates. As a web application programmer, I had to apply design methodologies to how code is written in order to achieve the most efficient result with the least resources consumption algorithms. Later on, working as support and test engineer, I was able to experience first hand how a well designed application can facilitate the tasks of the users and become a tool to speed the work rather than seen as a tedious obstacle to finishing the work in time.

I am very excited about the project as I see it as a valuable opportunity to work with like minded people who believe that design should remain fun, unreserved and unrestricted exploration of the imagination. I believe that design can learn from children how failure (in one idea) should not be perceived as the end, but rather a log which will keep the fire burning of many ideas to come.

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