Design & Research 2 | For: Birgit Bachler
Killing your darlings
During this semester I got a chance to visit CERN for a course called I2P. I was introduced to a lot of exciting concepts which were quite new and fascinating for me. Although I learned a lot and picked up so much stuff from there, one thing really stuck with me. It really helped me think and helped me narrow down my block on my topic later when I was stuck and feeling like I hit a dead end.
That concept was ‘kill your darlings’. Sometimes we are so obsessed with our topic or what we are creating that we start to get attached. We get biased about our own ideas. But the best approach is to know when to stop. Killing your darlings basically means letting go of an idea you love when it stops serving the project. You have to drop your own attachment so you can actually move forward.
Implementing this on my research made me realize that hitting a dead end might not be the end. It is actually an opportunity to divert to another topic. I have been actively looking for a new direction and the thing is I think I finally have a topic which is very close to my heart, or my brain, or my struggles honestly. It is about immigration in Austria as a non EU student, especially coming from a third world country. It feels like an absolute nightmare for a student.
I discussed this with my supervisors and they were super helpful and supportive of me pivoting from my initial idea, as this can be the basis for my work in the future. I do not want to use this post to explain exactly what my concept is just yet. I just want to mention that I will focus a little bit more towards service design right now. I will explain my new topic in detail in my next post.
