Design (Experience Design), MSD postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

During the twenty-minute interval at the regional theatre where I supervise front of house, roughly four hundred people try to buy a drink, find a toilet and get back to their seats. For two seasons I have watched the same pinch points form: the queue for the upstairs bar folds back across the stairwell, and people waiting for the accessible toilet stand where others are trying to pass. Last autumn I started noting how long each queue took to clear and where people stopped to look for signs. With the bar manager, I suggested moving pre-ordered interval drinks to a separate shelf by the door and adding a floor-level arrow towards the lower toilets. These were small, cheap changes, and the stairwell now stays clear most nights. They also confirmed something I had begun to suspect at university: the spaces I enjoy designing matter less than the sequence of moments people move through within them.

My degree in Interior Architecture gave me a solid grounding in spatial planning, materials and technical drawing, but my final-year project pushed me towards experience design. I chose to redesign the waiting area of a GP surgery near my university. Rather than starting with layout, I spent four mornings in the waiting room, with the practice manager's permission, mapping what happened from arrival to consultation. I spoke briefly with reception staff and, informally, with a handful of patients who were happy to chat. The most revealing finding was not about seating. Patients repeatedly got up to check whether they had been forgotten, because the call screen was only visible from half the room. My proposal moved the screen, added a simple paper queue indicator for times the screen failed, and zoned the seating so that people with pushchairs or walking frames were not wedged into corners. My tutors praised the drawings, but I was proudest of the journey map, because it made the design decisions traceable to things I had actually observed.

Since graduating I have read more widely to understand what I was doing by instinct. Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things gave me vocabulary for what I saw at the surgery, particularly signifiers and the gap between what designers intend and what users perceive. I have also worked through freely available material on service blueprinting, which helped me see that the theatre interval is not just a spatial problem but involves staff timing, stock preparation and the tills, most of which audiences never see. I want postgraduate study to develop this into a rigorous method: how to plan research properly, test prototypes with real users, and argue for a design when the evidence is mixed.

Outside work, I present a weekly listings slot on a community radio station, reading out local events and occasionally interviewing organisers. Writing a three-minute script that people will hear only once has made me careful about order and clarity, since a listener cannot scroll back. I also cycle to work most days, and I have become a reluctant connoisseur of confusing junction signage, which I sometimes sketch over a coffee afterwards.

My strengths are patient observation, a practical sense of what can be built or changed on a modest budget, and experience of working with front-line staff whose knowledge is often overlooked. My front-of-house role has taught me to stay calm with frustrated customers and to brief a team of volunteer ushers quickly. Where I need to grow is in research design and digital prototyping; I can produce a convincing floor plan, but I have only basic experience with interaction design tools and have not yet run structured usability testing. I am ready to work hard on both. A masters in experience design would let me combine my spatial training with the people-centred approach I have been developing in waiting rooms and theatre bars, and I hope eventually to work on public services where small, well-evidenced changes make ordinary days easier.