With a small turning point happening in both my professional and student lives, I wanted to create a new site. I’m in the process of receiving my bachelor’s degree in computer science and moving on, as is common in university studies in Finland, to a master’s degree. My major from now on will be interactive technology, which means that my main focus is going to be design. This is true for both, my studies and my work.

This, however, doesn’t mean that I’ll stop programming. I feel that you learn about design when you program things. And vice versa, while designing you learn about programming. They compliment each other.

I’ve worked as a freelancer for a good 2.5 years now, being involved in projects that I’ve designed and developed from scratch to projects in which I’ve worked on a smaller role. During summer breaks from school, I’ve been an employee in advertising agencies working as part of a larger team. What I found challenging with these summer jobs was that I had to be defined, am I a designer or a developer. What I didn’t realize before I started was that I couldn’t wear all the different hats that I had grown used to, switching from designer to developer to project manager when it was needed.

The computer science education that I received at the University of Tampere didn’t necessarily help with defining my role. From the very first classes I remember how heavily we focused on the design part of creating software before jumping into programming. All the school and freelance work I had done before being an employee had let me mix the different roles, so just typing up HTML didn’t feel right.

With this new site I hope to convey more clearly that I’m a designer, too. Even if I can and like to program, I can and like to design.

Design is about understanding people. But people are complex. The human mind can only hold a few things in mind at once. So if you’re human, you need to write things down in order to understand people. And design.