Student Achievements - Jack Canavan
'There are only upsides to promoting your work and getting it into the public eye. You never know who is looking at your work and how that could help in the long run'.
Student: Jack Canavan
Department: Product Design
Location: Dublin
Design Competition Awards
Mini Project: Ardú - Shortlisted for the RSA Student Design Awards
Major Project:Flo - Finalist for the Universal Design Grand Challenge 2020
Publication
Designing for the Uncommon Minority.
Published by Hacking Finance.
https://www.hacking.finance/read/designing-for-the-uncommon-minority/
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What career path did you want to follow as a child?
While I was growing up, I hadn’t a clear idea of what I wanted to be; but what I did know was that I was heavily interested in both sport and art. Moving more into the side of art, I had great influences like my mother and my art teacher Denyze Joyce at Skerries Art School, who opened me up to the idea of art being a possible career path.
Why did you decide to study at National College of Art & Design?
When the time came to decide on colleges, I had some exposure to the work happening in NCAD. I saw the work they were doing through someone I knew - product design graduate Nathan Joyce - and realised that’s something I wanted to be involved in. I had looked at other colleges and courses, but couldn’t find something else that I was genuinely interested in.
Tell us a bit about your award-winning design projects?
Both my projects during final year looked at individuals within our society that aren’t being cared for.
Ardú is an online learning platform that provides courses and mentorship programmes for mothers in the Irish direct provision system, because access to the labour market is restricted due to their asylum status and responsibilities as mothers.
Flo is a service that assists visitors to navigate museums, providing all guests with the ability to curate their visit to their needs. Flo is needed because the current curation of exhibition spaces does not fully accommodate the different sensory needs of neurodiverse individuals.
What is the one experience – during all the time you have invested in competition entries – that has informed you most in your career preparation and work to date?
It is most definitely the people who I have met, sometimes in the most unexpected ways. Preparing for these competitions lead me to understand that the design world is smaller than I realised; and that talking to companies now will help me move into a career after I graduate from NCAD.
If you were chatting with current NCAD students today about entering design competitions, what is the one piece of advice you would offer?
For those considering putting work up, whether that’s for competitions or just Instagram, my advice would be to just throw it out there and see what happens. There are only upsides to promoting your work and getting it into the public eye. You never know who is looking at your work and how that could help in the long run.
Portfolio Links:
https://jackcanavan.cargo.site/
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