Design Technology: Studio (MS) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Between the matinee and the evening show last month, I had forty minutes to take up the hem on a dress that a replacement actor needed that night. I work in the wardrobe department of a regional theatre, and those forty minutes are typical of what I enjoy about the job: a garment has to work on a particular body, under particular lights, for a particular set of movements, and it has to be fixed with whatever is to hand. I want to pursue postgraduate study in design technology because I have become increasingly interested in what happens when the materials themselves can sense, respond or record, and I would like the time and technical grounding to explore that properly in a studio setting.

My first degree was in textile design, where I specialised in knit. For my final-year project I developed a sleeve knitted partly with silver-plated conductive yarn, designed to register how far the wearer's elbow was bending. The resistance of the knitted section changed as it stretched, and I read those changes with a microcontroller and a simple voltage divider circuit. Getting a usable signal took most of the term. Early samples drifted as the yarn relaxed after repeated stretching, so I tested different stitch structures and tensions, logging readings across many bends for each sample, and found that a tighter rib with a non-conductive elastic plied in behaved far more consistently. The finished sleeve was not precise enough for anything clinical, and I said so in my report, but it gave a reliable enough reading to drive a small visualisation on a laptop. I was proud that the garment still looked and felt like knitwear rather than equipment with fabric attached.

That project showed me where my knowledge runs out. I can design and make a textile confidently, and I can follow tutorials to wire a sensor, but I do not yet understand electronics, programming or interaction design well enough to make deliberate choices rather than workable guesses. Since graduating I have been working through an introductory programming course online in the evenings and rebuilding parts of my project code so I understand every line rather than copying examples. I have also read Kate Fletcher's writing on sustainable fashion, which made me think harder about whether embedding electronics in clothing can be reconciled with garments that are repaired and kept for years. That tension, between responsive materials and longevity, is one I would like to investigate rather than ignore.

Wardrobe work has given me habits I expect to rely on in a studio. Costumes are altered, repaired and passed between performers, so I label, document and test my work constantly. I talk with actors about how something feels when they move, which is a form of user feedback, even if nobody calls it that. I am also used to working to a fixed deadline with a team who depend on me.

Outside work, I collect my younger brother from school three afternoons a week and help with his homework until our mother gets home, which has made me disciplined about how I use the rest of my time. I run most mornings, and a frustration with how my running tops ride up has become a small ongoing sketchbook of ideas about fit and ventilation, none of them electronic.

I am applying for a studio-based master's because I learn best by making, testing and revising, and I want to do that alongside people from engineering, computing and design backgrounds who will challenge my assumptions. I would bring practical making skills, patience with materials and a working sense of how garments behave on real bodies. I hope to leave with the technical fluency to design responsive textiles that people would actually choose to wear and keep.