Alumni Stories - Tim Dalton
"Service Design provides a space for incorporating many disciplines and skillsets into practical problem solving. The opportunity to study Service Design at NCAD was like finding the missing jigsaw puzzle piece"
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Name: Tim Dalton
Current Career: Service Design / design research/ strategic design
Graduation Year: 2021
Discipline: Service Design
Location: Kildare/ Living in Dublin
What career path did you want to follow as a child?
The first thing I really wanted to be was a cowboy, as I thought they were cool in movies and on television. I also drew them a lot. You don’t know you’re good at drawing until someone else tells you that you are. I discovered this in school, from peers. Drawing is something I liked doing a lot of the time. The cowboys disappeared but the art stayed.
I didn’t know how this could become a paying job, as no family member did this for a living. I’ve an aunt who is an architect. Architecture looked like an option but I wasn’t that good at technical drawing. I eventually found out there was something called a graphic designer. At that point, I knew this art thing could go somewhere. Huge relief all round.
Why did you decide to study at National College of Art & Design?
By the time I arrived at NCAD as a student I was already in my late forties. The previous twenty years plus and journey to get to NCAD had been spent studying Classical Animation, Fine Art Painting and Graphic reproduction technology at other colleges. During this period I had a successful career as a graphic designer in publishing and later in parliamentary politics. Then in 2020 I was laid off from a job I had for 16 years. I had a redundancy which meant I could afford to go into full time education and learn something new, gain a new perspective and pivot my career.
I applied for the Service Design master’s programme at NCAD. The Service Design course prospectus and outlook answered a lot of criteria I want, and am most interested in, in my work. Service Design provides a space for incorporating many disciplines and skillsets into practical problem solving. The opportunity to study Service Design at NCAD was like finding the missing jigsaw puzzle piece. The course content accommodated all my divergent interests. The course is also very practical which was appealing.
How did you develop your career towards your current job or practice?
My postgraduate studies at NCAD was pivotal. It allowed me to develop a new mindset and a new range of skills. The lecturers not only teach and give direction but encourage students to grow, develop and explore beyond the curriculum. You come out having learned how to teach yourself. This benefits me in my current career. I’ve learned that ideas need to be shared. This includes sharing research methods and techniques. There’s always more to learn. Some of my learning and development comes passively and a lot it comes from just doing the work.
What is the one experience during your time at NCAD that has informed you most in your career and work to date?
Turning research into findings, findings into actionable insights, insights into concepts, and concepts into prototypes was a bit of a struggle for me early on the Service Design master’s course. You learn to keep your focus on each stage of the process and not to move too quickly to the next step. You cannot simply jump to a solution too early. You learn to get more comfortable with the feeling of being a little bit lost in your research. You learn that the best way to overcome feeling lost is to work the design process step by step. Taking this approach really pays off at the end of each stage and prepares you to move on to the next stage. The Design process is fulfilling and very rewarding.
If you were chatting with current NCAD students today what is the one piece of advice you would offer?
Remember to look and read outside of your own discipline. It doesn’t matter if you don’t finish what you’re reading, just keep building your general knowledge. Your clients have end-users to consider, they are not going to be designers, and you really need to understand them.
Keep working. Even bad ideas are better than no ideas. Bad ideas may give you a good benchmark to work from. Bad ideas may be the beginning of good ideas. Some bad ideas deserve to be noted to maybe revisit in the future, they can have kernels of brilliance.
What new opportunities have developed for you as a result of changes in work practice during the Covid pandemic?
There are lots of new opportunities as a result of the pandemic enforced changes in work practice. Today, workshops and research happen a lot more frequently using online video calls. Online meetings have the advantage of getting people together much more easily. Online meetings may eliminate a time consuming commute for participants. Other positives are the range of available online collaborative tools you can use during online meetings. These tools make it possible to have ready-made outputs for everyone to take away at the end of each meeting. Also, I now find when interviewing end users online they are often at home and they are a lot more relaxed and comfortable than they would be in other surroundings. This type of interaction lends itself to a more free flowing dialogue.
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