I studied in a Faculty of Social Sciences. And just when many of my peers were taking the next step in their careers, moving into leadership and management roles, I decided to take a sharp turn: I moved to Italy to spend a year at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), a design school now based there.
What do policymaking, economic development and design have in common? I promise it makes sense in my head, so let me try to explain.
Design is about finding the right questions
After 13 intense months of practicing and learning, my definition of design has changed a lot. For me, design is about finding the right questions and identifying the real problems we are designing for. It is not about taking the first brief and jumping straight into ideation or execution. It is about shaping solutions together with the context, the people we design with, and even nature.
In my previous work in public policy, I was constantly facing social challenges and deeply complex, structural issues. Many of them came in cycles, appearing again and again. I was genuinely motivated to find solutions, but my question was always the same: how?
A lifelong habit of asking questions
Ever since school, my classmates found me a bit unusual because I asked so many questions in class. Asking questions, to people who know more and to myself, has always been my most effective way to learn. But when I started my professional life ten years ago, I realized that I also had to find the answers myself: paths that aligned with my vision, my personality and my skills, and that led to answers I could act on.
So I said yes. Let's see if studying design helps me find some of those answers.
Design the right thing
Design has become a powerful tool for tackling complex problems and identifying solutions that truly respond to people's needs. There is a well-known idea in design: design the right thing, and design the thing right. It was the first part, design the right thing, that pushed me to become a designer and take the risk of becoming a slightly different kind of professional, with a hybrid and, I believe, flexible profile.
Why not design for the challenges that matter most?
Another question kept coming back to me: why do we use design to create the next wearable or the best algorithm, but rarely use that same creativity to imagine solutions for the labor transition and the future of work, or to address care needs so that women can participate in the labor market if they choose to?
We can, and should, bring design into more spaces, including public policy.
With my new toolkit, I believe we can. That is one of my biggest lessons from this year.
What a hybrid profile brings to the table
I believe my profile, with strengths in pattern recognition, research, understanding and visualizing data, and building partnerships, has a lot to offer multidisciplinary design teams. It is a way to widen the lens and look at problems from different perspectives, grounded in people's realities.