Navigating Academia with a Design Mindset

For the past 13 years, I have worked in the design field, made digital products and toolkits, won design awards, and completed built works independently and through my practice. More recently, as an early career academic, I have turned my focus to researching design behaviour and cognition while teaching students to adopt more rigorous and critical approaches in their design processes. Straddling these dual identities of designer and academic has provided me with a unique lens to navigate both worlds, enabling me to enrich each practice with insights from the other. Despite their differences, I have observed parallels between design and research realms, particularly in dealing with ambiguity, iterative problem-solving, and resilience in the face of failure. These parallels have shown me that design approaches may be useful in addressing the challenges of academia, a space often marked by high stress, burnout, and mental health challenges. So in this chapter, I reflect on my design experience and wonder, How as a designer, does 1) working with ambiguous problems, 2) prioritising prototyping, and 3) failing forward, enhance my research resilience in academia?

keywords: academic resilience, design mindset, ambiguity, prototyping, failure

• year: February 2024 — ongoing