Toru Miyamoto
Japan
CAREER Enrolled in April 2011; Completed master’s degree in March 2013
At KMD I joined a project called “OIKOS” where I studied how to design services that would help retail store staff encourage customer to make purchases. In our study, we began by analyzing behavior, brainstorming ideas, formulating the concepts, and building prototypes. Then we took our prototypes and used them in actual retail stores to verify whether they worked. We repeated this process over and over again. It was a good experience designing something from scratch.
KMD is a very global environment that attracts people with all sorts of backgrounds. You have the opportunity to work with professors and students who are interested and active in a wide range of fields. In the Project Room, I spoke and consulted with lots of different people, which was a good experience for me.
I’m now working as a creator at an internet company where my job every day is to think about designs and interactions that will make users want to use our services more. In the future, I want to use my experiences at KMD to continue to explore new frontiers.
(This article was written in March 2015.)