For the past year I’ve been questioning what the hell I’m doing with my career. The irony of my university experience in Dundee (which is currently UNESCO’s “City of Design”) is that despite it being intended to be a massive opportunity to learn and grow, I’ve spent a lot of my three years in tutorials and classes feeling a bit confused. I’ve been taught how to design products from inspiration to prototype, but I still didn’t really know why or even what I wanted to design.

I’d been trying really hard to find something to be interested in, and another irony is that this search had left me feeling interested in nothing. I tried everything from service design to creating a fancy Scandinavian lamp (below); with the latter project I realised that simply making things pretty didn’t cut it for me – I wanted to design for new needs instead of already-met wants.

Then one night on LinkedIn, I stumbled across this company Made by Many and read all about how they’d made Hackaball, which I thought was a truly outstanding piece of work. They were looking for interns with my kind of education and experience. I felt a tinge of sadness and kept scrolling: why would an awesome company like that want to employ me? A week later I decided to bite the bullet and apply, and… you can probably guess what happened next.

Coming to London, I was excited to learn as much as possible, and because Made by Many's design process is so similar to what I’d learnt in Dundee, I was willing to act as a sponge and take as much possible on board. I wanted to use the lessons learned to build upon and move forward, and have a successful final year at university. So right from my first day at Diespeker Wharf, I've been learning: about design, project management, and life in general.

As I write this, we’re just past the halfway mark of the three-month internship, and the most important takeaway so far has come from working with the other two interns, Niklas and Thomas. With our different areas of expertise, I feel quietly hopeful about the project we're undertaking, where the brief is to build something that improves happiness in the workplace using artificial intelligence.

Seeing through the eyes of both a product manager and a technologist has also made me rethink what I'm doing, at all times making it not only valuable for a user, but feasible and viable in business and technology terms. More and more we’re clicking as a team: yesterday Thomas and I realised that we’d both agreed on a design decision without the usual long, protracted discussion about design issues versus the technological limitations. It's fun to joke about these things, but in fact it shows that we're beginning to think through the problems that we face not as individual practitioners, but as a design team. From now on, I won't just think like a designer, but will instead wear the caps of project manager and bit­part technologist at all times.

One thing I wanted to learn from Made by Many is how the company does human-centered research and conduct user testing to inform their design process. Research can separate good design from bad, and having had interview tutorials and sketching workshops, I now have a clearer starting point to conduct it with – something I've always tried to expand to be more than mere chit-chat. At Made by Many it’s constantly stressed to release prototypes quick and early in order to adhere to the methodologies of Lean and Agile: this has taken time to adjust to, but I can see the benefits of getting feedback as soon as possible in order to make the best design.

Beyond that, these weeks have given me plenty of food for thought about what I want to do in future. The brief itself has both a deep technological and human aspects to it, and it has inspired me to think about the project that I will undertake when I return home – I’ve been thinking about looking further into ideas around productivity and happiness, giving consideration to something that draws upon elements of both social and technological influences.

So this internship has also given me confidence and inspiration: confidence in coming up with ideas and making them happen, and inspiration to look in the right places and ask the right questions. As to what the future holds, the answer I kept asking myself during my third year at university is still not quite answered, but now I know that I can combine my skills with a newfound enthusiasm and endeavour to design.

In truth, I’ll probably never fully comprehend what the hell I actually am doing, but my experience at Made by Many has made me much more comfortable stepping into the unknown.