Design & the Market: Finance Workshop.

Our final workshop for ‘Design and the Market’ was on finance. We discussed the direct (materials, advertising…) and indirect (salaries, rent…) costs we will face when setting up a business and outside factors that will have a financial impact on our business such as the economy.

We were each given a ‘Finance Sheet’ to complete. I completed this based on the idea of opening my own interior design business. I found the blue and yellow sections difficult as I don’t know how much an interior designer would generally charge for their work or what my competitors charge. Even although I’m not going to open my own business at the moment I am really interested to find out the answers, hopefully over the summer I will have the opportunity to talk to people in the industry and find out more.

The second half of the workshop was about raising money to finance a project or a start up. Instead of going to the bank for money we discussed an alternative ‘Crowd Funding’. Crowd funding is the collective co-operation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money and other resources together usually via the internet to support efforts initiated by other people or organisations. It also allows people with good ideas to break through even if they don’t fit the pattern usually required by conventional financiers. However as work is going into the public domain theses people do face the risk of their ideas being stolen. ‘Kickstarter’ is an American website that allows people to show their work and gain support and financial backing from others. They set a monetary target and if they reach it they get the money.  In class we filled out a ‘Kickstarter’ pitch sheet. It’s a really good way of raising money and hopefully they’ll be a U.K. equivalent soon. Discussing this as a class we thought this would be a great idea for raising money for our degree show next year.

Now all the workshops are over I’m going to look back and see which are relevant to apply to my research proposal for assignment 2. It’s time to get the proposal finished, checked and ready to hand in after Easter.