How sharing my story helped me bounce back from rock bottom
In August 2011, I moved to London from Sweden as a design graduate full of dreams and hopes.
Six months later I had just found a job at a café as job hunting proved to be more challenging than I had thought. A few freelance projects that I was offered, paid more with experience than with money.
At the end of May 2012 I managed to find an (unpaid) internship at an architecture practice, to apply Service Design on a community project the Architect was developing. I was at the office or doing field research for three days a week and three more days I was working at the café to pay the rent.
At the end of the first week, my laptop got stolen. I was already broke, I was basically living on porridge and I couldn't work from home or job hunt anymore. The day after, my cheap second hand smart phone died, so I couldn't reach my family on Skype any longer.
Naturally, the resilience I had developed within 10 months in London was failing me. As a designer, my MacBook is a tool I cannot do without. In the summer of 2012 I was offline, borrowing my roommate's laptop to talk to my parents and I couldn't afford a ticket to go back Home.
Over a month later, a former professor of mine contacted me, asking how my process was going. I wasn't too proud to complain about how difficult my life felt at the moment. A while later he came back to me, offering a freelance project, in the intersection of Architecture and Service Design, with an up-front payment in the form of a new MacBook. I was beyond grateful. Having my computer back was insanely helpful to feel that I was still on my process after a schism in time.
In October I had taken the decision to move to Amsterdam, as I saw no point in staying in London. A good friend of mine directed me to a job opportunity with the Design Thinkers Group, who were looking for a Visual Design intern with focus on Service Design. Naturally, for my application I showed the deliverables from my professor's brief and I got the job.
Solace through Compassion
In the story above one can identify a few opportunities where I could have received help. Every single one of us has felt the agony of not being able to get out of similar situations and move forward. Every single one of us has something spare that another one might need.
Later that year, two people contacted me, as they needed guidance through their process. One was a teenager from Athens, who wanted to study Product Design in Sweden and had found me through the alumni group of my University in Sweden. The other person was an Architecture student from Lithuania, who was working on her degree project, a theatre, and had found my degree project through my online portfolio, which was also a theatre. I identified myself in them and gave them something more than information. I gave them the certainty that they can count on me.
This is how the world goes round. Help is offered and help is received on daily basis. Through an online platform where one can express their experience, the audience of storytelling expands. Through online media the word of mouth travels from Thessaloniki to Sydney in just a click. And good will has a tremendous value to people who are in need.
Through the support of Heeeelp.me we are bringing people together and we are creating a ground for the exchange of positive vibrations.
Kallirroi Pouliadou is an MA Interaction Design student at Umeå Institute of Design, with a background on Industrial Design and Architecture. Her support of Heeeelp.me focuses on the impact of Service Design on Social Innovation.
