Alex Milton

In my own opinion Alex Milton was the best guest speaker we heard from. From the moment he started talked to now as I think back on the lecture I can just tell that he loves his job which is a spectacular thing to see. Currently he is a policy designer and was the programme director for the Irish year of Design 2015. Born in Britain, he trained as a car designer and has moved from car design to different disciplines over his 25 years as a designer.He moved onto Fashion Design, made concept cars which was copied eight year later by BMW, Product Design and eventually onto designing policies most notably ID 2015. He worked for companies such as Citroen and Caterham cars, worked with Asian designer Issey Miyake and set up initiatives like ClayStation and MyChair as he wanted to empower people to design. Alex developed the skill of describing form and the language of objects like Vico Masaty who could describe the form over a phone to a model maker. As a result of all this he adopted an educational Philosophy and wanted to reimagine design. He feels we should be immersed in the design world and as designers we should always be developing skills and learning new skills.

Follow on from that he immediately immersed us into policy design something that was very new to all of us. He asked us to come up with our own design statement to improve the design presence in Ireland and to make people aware of what product designers actually do basically what we would do if we could start ID 2015 from scratch. I was in a team with Rebecca, Sinead, Rachel and Amy. Time was running short and pressure was running high as we all wanted to impress Alex with our work even though most of us would probably never see him again. Even with the pressure skyrocketing with each passing moment I was enjoying every second as a result of a fantastic team. Once we picked the slogan everything started to come together. Our slogan was "In the Cupboard Under the Stairs..." Our main reason behind this was the fact that nobody seems to know what we as Product Designers actually do and neither to they know that we are in the basement in the Foundation building. I personally loved our slogan because it really fits with us because no-one know we are under the stairs the "dungeons" and also it doesn't hurt that it is a Harry Potter reference either. The main point we wanted to get across was what product design is and what we actually do to impact peoples daily lives. The door in the picture above symbolises us trying to open the door to show everyone what it is we do. The pictures inside the door are, what we thought,best describe what design is.

Looking back on it now it was the best way to end a terrific year in Product Design and I can't wait for next semester.