Meet the Design interns: David, Tom and Hahyun

Our Talent Manager, Sara Aronsson, grabbed a few minutes of downtime between projects to find out all the latest.

Sara: It’s already been a crazy-busy few months here at Daresay in terms of new hires, awards and, of course, projects! What have you guys been working on?

David: I’ve been a part of the team at Arbetsförmedlingen (the Swedish Public Employment Service, a government agency) which has been exciting, intense and a lot of fun. My role in this project has been quite diverse, spanning from interaction design, visual design, prototyping and concept development to guerilla usability tests and presenting/communicating design solutions to different teams and stakeholders.

During this experience, I’ve also got back into practicing meditation, which I feel has improved my ability to channel creativity, manage stress, be a holistic thinker and concentrate for longer periods of time.

Hahyun: First of all, it surprises me that it’s already three months! I have been working on very technically challenging project, which I can’t reveal too much about right now, but I can say that it really helping me to improve my digital design skills. Before moving onto the next project, I was able to spend some time preparing the D&AD Award for young designers. My personal interest is the research phase of service design, enabling a better understanding of people’s needs and getting to the bottom of problems. The competition brief requires innovative service design for a hospitality brand, so the feedback from people of Daresay, with their diverse expertise, has really helped me to carry out creative, targeted research and understand customer needs.

Throughout my time here so far, the support from my mentors, Charles and Anna, has been so important, with us constantly exchanging ideas. Also, I’ve been learning how my colleague Heba, who visited from from our Dubai office, uses a storytelling for business strategy. Whenever I have become focused on my own perception, the people around me have helped me to see things from different angles and freshened my perspective with new insights, which has been amazing.

Tom: The last month and a half I’ve been part of an Ericsson project called Connect to Learn. The goal of the project is to develop an online platform that will help teachers in developing countries provide better education to their students using digital lesson material made available through the platform. Besides working with interaction design and user insights, I also organised a usability test, creating the necessary prototypes, and writing a test script with activities that test participants were asked to perform. It was a great success and the results helped us further improve the product.

I’ve also been writing a journal about my daily experiences. I’m using the journal as a tool to reflect and set goals, both short- and long term. Together with my mentor we have weekly sessions. During these sessions we reflect on the previous week. The journal plays a valuable role during these sessions and also helps me capture things I experience during the internship.

Sara: What are you most looking forward to for the remaining months of your internship?

David: I really look forward to seeing how Arbetsförmedlingen will help improve the experience for job seekers, and hopefully I can take further part in the concept creation of the new team there as well. I also look forward to hosting my workshop in May!

Hahyun: During the last week, I was helping create a design brief for new members of the Daresay team. Since it is important to represent our voice and objectives clearly within the brief, it was quite challenging to set the right challenge and inspire them to fulfil their potential. In a way, it was a brief for myself as well, and I’m looking forward to seeing the creative solutions they come up with in answer to the brief.

Tom: After delivering the Connect to Learn project, I have started working on a project for Länsförsäkringar bank – a new client for me, bringing lots of new challenges! It’s very different from the other two projects I’ve been a part of, so I’m looking forward to learning much more as we work through it.