Design Informatics MA (eca) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Taped to the window of the depot office where I work is a printed timetable that a driver once annotated in biro: small arrows beside three stops, each marked 'always late here, school run'. The scheduling software I use every day had no record of this. It knew average journey times, not why a particular Tuesday afternoon fell apart. That gap between what a dataset holds and what people actually know about a place is the reason I want to study design informatics at postgraduate level.

My first degree was in Product Design, and I graduated with a 2:1. The course was strong on physical prototyping and user research, and I enjoyed both, but my final-year project pushed me towards data. I designed a set of bins for the communal kitchens in my student halls, each fitted with a cheap load sensor and a microcontroller that logged weight every few minutes. The aim was to see whether a simple display showing a flat's weekly food waste would change behaviour. Building the hardware was the easy part. The harder questions were about interpretation. A spike in weight might mean a party, a fridge clear-out before the holidays, or someone emptying a recycling bag into the wrong bin. I ended up pairing the logs with short weekly conversations with residents, and the conversations explained more than the numbers did. My display design changed three times as a result, moving from a league table between flats, which residents disliked, to a plain weekly line for each kitchen with space for handwritten notes. I would not claim it reduced waste in any measurable way over one term, but it taught me how much design decisions shape what data seems to say.

Since graduating I have worked as a scheduling clerk for a regional bus operator. My job is ordinary: allocating drivers to duties, logging changes, and fielding calls when a route runs short. It has given me a practical sense of how data systems sit inside organisations. Drivers, supervisors and the planning team each read the same information differently, and much of my work is translating between them. I have built a small spreadsheet tool that flags duties likely to break rest-time rules after a late change, which my supervisor now uses during the morning rota check. It is modest, but it showed me that useful tools often come from paying attention to where people already improvise.

To prepare for further study I have been teaching myself Python through evening online courses, mostly working with open transport data, and I have read Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's Dear Data, whose hand-drawn postcards of everyday data made me rethink my bin display. I have also read Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein's Data Feminism, which gave me language for something I had noticed at the depot: that what gets counted reflects who designed the counting.

Outside work I coach a junior badminton session on Saturday mornings and keep an allotment with my flatmate. Neither is connected to design, though coaching has made me better at explaining things simply, and the allotment has made me patient with slow projects.

I am applying for a master's because I want to combine my design training with stronger technical and critical skills in working with data, and to do so alongside people from different disciplines. I am particularly interested in how public services, such as transport, could be designed so that local knowledge like that biro annotation is captured rather than lost. I would bring practical prototyping experience, a working knowledge of how data is used in an operational setting, and a habit of asking people what the numbers miss.