Designer's Identity
Program Overview
Among graduates of creative studies, junior designers, or pioneers in new fields, we identify a need to ground themselves in the field. To build a portfolio, network and possibly start their own company. Designer's Identity is a professional track in which we guide these designers in defining their identity as professionals.
In general, Designer's Identity requires one day a week (every Friday) and 3 long weekends (often from Thursday until Sunday) of your time. This one day a week you will have time to work on your own goals that you set at the start of the program. In total the program takes roughly 5 months and includes an onboarding weekend, a designer’s weekend, a war room weekend, life-coaching, design coaching, and a design mentor. We start every September and February.
The Framework
1Onboarding weekend
The very first part of the program is the Onboarding weekend. During this weekend, we welcome you into the culture of Designer's Identity and get you started. Also, we take a first step into your development plan to direct your learnings, based on your own core question.
The core question is what brings you to our program, the articulation of what you want to gain from it. It can help allocate projects, connect you to the right life coach and design mentor and gives focus during the rest of the program.
2Designer's weekend
During the Designer’s weekend we will do a deep dive in a design process and into topics that help develop a moral compass as a designer, or help articulate the rooting of your design language. This weekend gives you the understanding of your own way of working and can help you define what you want to change or strengthen.
3War Room weekend
The War Room weekend is the weekend where we plot the developments and learnings up to the present day (including the transition and insights from our program) in order to define a concrete plan of action for the future.
Life Coach Sessions
Life coaching is our way of making sure you are doing well. A life coach is there to help strengthening personal qualities, reduce insecurities, be more self-aware, and more self-directed. Throughout the program, 4 sessions are scheduled when and where you want (in agreement with the life coach). Life coach sessions are one-on-one.
Design Mentor & intervision
You probably have something specific you want to develop. Maybe you want to learn how you to remain creative in a corporate environment, or learn more about user involvement in design processes, or become better equipped for transitional design? We connect you to one of our design coaches, who will be your mentor for this specific task. This way you will build experience (great to share in your portfolio) and learn more from this expert. You can either apply this task in the organisation you work for, or for a project you choose yourself.
Applying learnings to your work
We encourage you to apply the learnings from Designer's Identity directly to a professional context - whether you are already working in a company, or you are starting your own. In addition, we offer opportunities to work with our clients at Fundamentals in projects. By doing so, you can get to know our coaches and clients, but also receive valuable feedback on how you are doing as a professional.
© Fundamentals Academy BV 2021