How my interest for design started

Some People Just Got That Thing

I used to love the question, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” As a kid, there were so many opportunities in front of you. You’d be enjoying yourself in the pool or at the playground, with zero worries in the world. Eventually, when you hit your teenage years, that question changes. It might still be the same on the surface, but the answer is expected to be a bit more thought-through. Depending on your favorite subject in school, you’d probably have an idea of where you’d like to go, PE = olympic competitor, math = Albert Einsten.. you get the gist of it.

High School and Pressure

When I started high school in 2018, I chose social sciences as my main subject. Not because it was super interesting, but because it suited my merit score, and the program offered a trip to New York in year three. Honestly that made the choice a bit easier when comparing other schools, it was worth my 45 min trips to Strängnäs every day. Oh, and the New York trip? Never happened. This thing called Covid-19 happened.

During those years, the pressure started to build. The question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” didn’t sit well anymore. You feel like you’re supposed to have an answer, to be ready with a reply for anyone who asks. It turns into, “What do you want?” with a passive-aggressive undertone.

To be quite frank, I never really knew what I wanted during high school. With a loving family that likes to act on stuff right away, which I appreciate in many ways, these sorts of scenarios made that question a tad more difficult for me to answer.

The Day of Choosing

In Sweden, once you finish high school, you have three choices: either you work, you study, or you don’t do “anything.” That “anything” usually ends up being a “finding yourself” trip for a lot of people. Honestly, you should travel as a young person. I love seeing people my age traveling and exploring the world. But for me, I was just stuck in between the work or study choices.

Discovering Design

But this pressure made me rewind. What did I actually enjoy doing in my spare time? When I was a kid, I loved drawing and sketching out whatever came to mind, filling notebooks with doodles and tracing characters from the TV, my head went up-down-up-down until I had the full character traced on my sheet of paper. It was never about being perfect, just about creating something from nothing. Later, during grades 7 to 9, I started making YouTube banners and logos for friends online. At the time, I didn’t really think of it as “design”, it was just a fun way to be creative, something that connected me to gaming and my friends, but also gave me a sense of accomplishment when someone liked what I made.

Looking back, I realize how much I enjoyed that feeling: the process of turning someone’s idea into a visual, seeing their reaction, and knowing I’d made something that mattered to them. It wasn’t just about the graphics even though I thought so, it was more about the connection, the communication, and the impact it had on someone else.

Then, in 9th grade, I got my first camera. Suddenly, I was seeing the world differently, paying attention to light, angles, and moments. Moments are really important, I just felt like I had an eye for that. Photography became another way for me to express myself and share my perspective. My dad helped me a lot, and those experiences taught me not just about technical skills, but about observation and storytelling.

So when it came time to make that big decision after high school, I realized that design had always been there in the background. It wasn’t just a hobby, it was the thread running through everything I enjoyed. The challenge was figuring out what kind of design I wanted to pursue, since the field is so broad and full of possibilities. My mom just had to show me it, thanks mom.

My mom mentioned the Interaction Design program at my local university. The idea of combining design with an understanding of how people use and experience things really caught my eye.. and my moms for that matter. It wasn’t just about making things look good, which is obviously fun, but it was about making things work well for real people. That connection between creativity and human experience is what excites me most about design, and it’s what keeps me motivated to keep learning and growing in this field.

Human-Centred Design

The program introduced me to the world of human-centred design, and I love separating those two ideas, as you might already see on this website. They’re together a lot because they’re two interests of mine. The human-centred part is about working with people. I’m fascinated by the way we interact with things, whether it’s design or physical interactions with each other. We have so much to learn from each other, and that’s why those two go so well together. We need to design for humans and understand how we interact with what’s been designed.

Looking Forward

Now, when I think about that question: “What do you want to do?” I no longer feel the same pressure to have a perfect answer. I know I want to keep exploring the intersection of design and human experience, and that’s enough for now. If you’re in a similar place, unsure of your next step, remember: sometimes the things you love have been with you all along, just waiting for you to notice.