Alex Milton

Today was the last "official" contemporary design class as it is week 12 and its fair to say it went out with a bang as we welcomed the very talented designer Alex Milton in to give us a talk and a workshop and as you can imagine it was very interesting! He started by giving us a background about himself, where he studied, where he had worked right up to why he was standing in front of us today.

He raised a very important topic that im guessing not many of us had given much thoght to before and that was design in ireland and how it is recognised across the world and it was only today that we realised how underappreciated Irish design is. Alex milton himself was the director of ID15 which was the Irish year of design, it worked towards raising the profile or Irish design at home and abroad, increasing awareness of the value of design and just basically trying to show the world how good Ireland is at design! This whole idea is something all of us designers should support 110% as the more successful it is, the more successful we will be as designers, it is about creating awareness so that our worked can be viewed on a global scale.

One aspect of the talk which I was very interested in was when Alex described how he designed the interior of the London underground carriage. He explained how he filled a carriage with people and got a group of teenagers to rock the carriage from side to side, basically simulating if the carriage was rocking from side to side on one of its journeys and he recorded what the people in the carriage's actions were. This to me was a genious idea, I would have never thought of trying that and it just seems that to be a successful designer you really do have to think outside the box or outside the carriage in this case. It adds more to my thought that you really cant understand something unless you actually try it or get other people to test it and this is how you really learn about how to improve a product and/or design.

I felt that Alex Milton was very inspiring, to see a designer be as successful as him is great to see and it really shows how far you can get when you put in the time and effort required. I felt todays talk was very educational and I think that any time we get to engage with people who are in the working world and know what its like to be in our shoes starting off is invaluable as it can only prepare us more for what to expect and what we have to do to be a successful designer.