Advising

This is a living (that is work-in-progress) note about strategic management of life-long learning in support of creative work and intellectual development. It's purpose is to support students with advice and tips on useful approaches.

This note has design students in mind and is informed by the commitments and interests of Deep Design Lab and Stansilav Roudavski.

Long-Term Life Choices

Consider taking a strategic approach to your creative and productive activities (rather than, or as well as, a professional career).

Why?

it is hard to predict what you will be good at
it is hard to know they everyday feel and life/work balance of career choices
future practices and careers are likely to be substantially different from what we see now
what seems interesting or useful might prove ineffective or harmful at a closer inspection

As one example, affective altruism (cf. Longtermism) provides a workable framework for further reflection.

For example, here is their tool for making career choices that can also apply to other decision making:

How to choose a career

Another related example is the last chapter of this book also discusses career planning.

MacAskill, William. What We Owe the Future. New York: Hachette, 2022.

Or this is a podcast that discusses career choices that you might agree or argue with.

The Purpose of Universities

This is, you might have noticed, under active debate. Some would say that the point of education is to prepare you for the professions, but others do not agree. Complicity with the current state of affairs will lead to further problems for the life on this planet.

Instead, the challenge for humans, and for their systems of education in particular, is to reinvent societies in more-than-human terms. So that they could serve and support all forms of life. One can call this the 'ecological university' or the university for life.1

The advice below aims to support your individual efforts in making this ethical innovation possible.

Learning

The learning after school is much less prescribes so it is productive to understand what learning is and how to learn in the context of different organisations.

There is literature that can put this into perspective, for example:

Bain, Ken. What the Best College Students Do. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

You can also find various advice and examples on how others do it, for example:

Thomas Frank's channel on learning productively

Knowledge Management

Aim to establish life-long learning habits that can help you to choose directions, keep track of your progress and make your knowledge useable. A common metaphor is that of the second brain, you do not need to keep all your knowledge and skills in mind for them to be accessible. Zettelkasten is a popular approach on paper. It inspired many digital replications and there are other methods too.

Use knowledge management software, Obsidian, Dendron (my favourite that is unfortunately no longer actively developed), logsec, Zettlr, etc. based on Markdown to keep persistent notes on your learning and creative work: you can record and manage concepts, evidence, examples of projects, styles, names of designers, etc. Lookup ideas on personal-knowledge management and workflow management, it is an active area of discussion right now.

This approach will also help you to document your activities and achievements for your portfolio and CV.

There is quite a bit of literature on this, for example:

Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking. 2nd ed. 2017. Reprint, North Charleston: CreateSpace, 2022.

Reference Management

Use Zotero to manage references to evidence, including books, articles, etc. Universities often provide EndNote but this is commercial. This can be useful throughout your career.

Conceptual and Cultural Learning

Engage with systematic reading on your topics of interest. Use the university subscriptions to academic literature, university libraries provide access to many books and most journals. Use Google Scholar to find evidence-based materials on interesting topics.

Listen to the podcasts on relevant topics to engage with ideas within and beyond your field, here are some good ones.

Skill Development

Aim to develop distinctive skills in making. Carpentry, fabrication, robotics, drawing and painting, sculpture, mechatronics, photography, sensing, computational analysis and simulation, digital modelling and rendering, etc.

Learn software independently. The common rule of thumb is that it takes 10,000 to master any skill so it is important to learn consistently. It is also important to develop personalised skills with any tools, digital or analogue. This can provide you with a competitive advantage and deep expertise. There are many excellent online tutorials of a broad variety of topics, for example on creative programming. Online courses such as LinkedIn Learning cover many tool-related topics.

Get a variable speed add-on such as this one for your browser to watch videos at higher speed to save time. You can do the same with podcasts and audiobooks.

Learn to program, at least at the level of scripting and customisation. This ability can be useful in all creative professions. Most industrial programs provide programmatic interfaces with which users can extend their functionality. Most innovations depend on such extensions. JavaScript is very common, Python too, if you need a place to start, Processing addresses art and design specifically.

Use online learning resources and online communities of practice for your learning. For example, Grasshopper has a strong community, Houdini is another example, the same is true about MAX/MSP.

Creative Growth

Aim to create your own projects outside of the university assignments or as extensions of assignments.

Consider volunteering and offering your design skills to charities and issue-driven campaigns to have opportunities to work on real project and develop useful contacts. In Melbourne, examples include CERES, Collingwood Children's Farm. In Australia and beyond: animal sanctuaries, Sea Shepherd, and many other organisations.

Seek opportunities to engage with teaching or research projects at the university, as a volunteer or an assistant.

Aim to exhibit, publish and present your work at public events.

Take part in regular and ad-hoc design competitions. There are many aggregator sites around, have a look. Here are some:

Networking

Explore communities outside the university, professional organizations, student organisations, NGOs. Consider joining conferences, exhibitions, publications, and campaigns they organise.

Join mailing lists in your discipline or your areas of interest to receive alerts about events and opportunities. Many communities of practice also maintain online presence on forums, Reddit, Discord, GitHub or other platforms.

Some examples of mailing lists include:

Attend research and professional conferences, especially now when many are online.

Attend lectures, events, presentations, book launches, exhibitions across the university and outside of your immediate discipline.

Join sporting or interest clubs, at the university and beyond.

Footnotes

Barnett, Ronald. The Ecological University: A Feasible Utopia. London: Routledge, 2018. Barnett, Ronald, and Søren Smedegaard Bengtsen. Knowledge and the University: Reclaiming Life. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.˄