By Rebecca Knowe
After working as an in-house graphic designer for several years, I was bored. Entering the MGD program looking for more challenging design work, I found it through design that embraces complex problems, systems thinking, and research (of all stripes). One project aimed to design learning content for middle schoolers. My collaborator and I got the chance to observe a middle school classroom and interview the teacher. It brought the whole project to life for me—to see the people that would use the design I created, and more easily imagine what the design could help them do. Next, I took a class in Qualitative Research Methods to learn how to ask better questions and gather more actionable information. The research for that class seamlessly informed an additional design studio project—and I was hooked! Design work was brought to life for me when I could connect it to real people, and to solving their concrete problems.
I credit NCSU, my hardworking professors, and my talented peers with giving me the tools to build a career based on work I love. I did not feel very confident upon entering the program (nor during it), but applying those tools to real-world problems later on showed me how powerful they were, and boosted my confidence like nothing else could. Specifically, I saw that skills like systems thinking, a design thinking mentality and process (to iterate with several ideas and evaluate what works), knowing how to lean on frameworks and theories derived from research, building the skills to do my own research, and continually revising and evolving my understanding of the world applied very clearly and directly to work as a user experience designer.
Ten years ago I began working at IBM, initially as a user experience designer who did research—now as a researcher who is also a designer. In the beginning, I designed user interfaces and asked lots of questions about who would use them—but found few answers that would tell me whether I had created a “good” design or not. Shifting quickly into more research work to answer my questions, I focused more and more on collaborating with users to determine what would best meet their goals, and worked with the UX designers to shape findings into design principles. Now user research makes up the majority of my work, and I’ve also gotten to see the discipline mature and its demand increase in the industry.
For me the most exciting part of a new project is learning about the people who will benefit from it. It’s exciting, in a very anthropological way, to learn about the worlds of people who are different from me. People ask if I miss “doing design work,” but I still consider myself a designer—just one who works at the “fuzzy front end” of new problems and concepts, to point our explorations in a direction with the most possibility of success. I design experiences that let me learn more about people. And communications to demonstrate the value we propose creating for them. And bridges between what they say and do, and what my team should do about it. I love marrying design work with the work to understand people who will use it.
In my design philosophy, design is educating. Design is communicating, helping others understand new perspectives, and leaving a legacy. For me design can be practical, as well as beautiful or challenging. It took me a long time to realize and accept this. If you are inspired to solve utilitarian, concrete problems for real people, you are no less a designer, no less creative, than our brilliant colleagues who create unequalled beauty, speak to the culture, or challenge the intellect. There is a place, and a need in this world, for the thoughtful contributions of every designer. Don’t get discouraged thinking you must fit into the same categories of the designers who have come before you. This was a struggle for me for a long time, but the work I love dearly now did not really exist yet when I began my journey as a designer. You have unique gifts. Keep working to find the places to use them—they will reveal themselves.
Rebecca Knowe works as a Senior User Experience Researcher at IBM, where she has focused on software design, concept research, and business strategy since 2013. She graduated from the NCSU Master of Graphic Design program in 2012, after several years of working as a freelance and in-house graphic designer.
After living in Texas for 8 years, she recently returned to the Triangle area and now enjoys trying out vegetable gardening and historic home improvement projects. In her spare time she also likes to travel, watch documentaries, study history and biographies, and volunteer with education and poverty-alleviation programs.
