From an upcoming essay. Stay tuned

Design affects every waking moment of our day, from our coffee machines grinding in the morning to pushing open the door of your office, to the system of voting and paying taxes in your country. These designs unequivocally affect how people behave in a society, often embodying roles of power and authority in everyday life.
What then must be studied is the importance of whether design is inclusive for everybody and how exactly it can be used to alter and influence behaviour and solve problems. Langdon Winner describes this fact as obvious that the various technological, industrial and communication designs are made a certain way that changes the power and experience of citizenship. In his book Design as Politics, Tony Fry notes that changing the status quo can either be done by choice or by prefigured intent, which in its essence is design...

In the recent weeks of working as a freelancer in different companies around Dublin, I frequented every kind of office from the dreary, 70’s architecture boltholes to tech giants such as WeWork and Twitter, whose buildings gained international reputation as ‘the best places to work’ and whose gleaming windows, steel architecture and rooftop ‘hangout zones’ glittered in the Dublin skyline. Whenever I was lucky enough to gain access to these enormous vessels of creative activity, I was in constant awe of the perks these techies seemed to gain every day. They had eight different kinds of jam at breakfast! You could go into a relaxation room and colour in ‘adult’ mandalas, meditate and play with slime (I know). They had beer on tap on every floor and a pick ‘n’ mix in the micro-kitchens! You could use standing desks and take advantage of the hundreds of Apple products scattered around the...

Yes, I’ve tried yoga. The Calm app doesn’t work for me. No, I don’t have to explain myself to you.

Around the time of summer 2010, in the days of BBM ‘pings’ and incessant Facebook posting, Amanda Bynes, a childhood heroine of mine, experienced a very public psychotic and mental breakdown that turned her traumatic and terrifying experience into a circus, with a public jury out to obsess, observe and turn to hysterics over her actions and spiralling downfall. Stories of her walking around New York in different wigs, throwing a bong out of her apartment window, accusing her family members of molesting her and erratic tweeting were stamped across headlines. Everybody seemed to revel at her confusing and, outwardly amusing behaviour, prompting a public commentary of her being ‘crazy’ and kicking off an early 2010’s stigma of mental health problems. Courtney Love, perhaps one of the most...

I recently took it upon myself to attempt to count each time I said sorry in the space of a day. The same day over breakfast, I had read a tweetstorm about how a female CEO had been told off in a patronising way by her male counterpart for apologising too often, how it had infuriated her, but also how it made her stop and look at herself and question whether her outrage was legitimate or not. In a way, I know how she feels - being told to ‘calm down’ or ‘stop fretting’ by anybody, let alone a man doing almost the exact same job as you gets to me in the worst way. But saying ‘sorry’? I gave it some thinking and realised that I myself was guilty of this, constantly being made aware of it by my friends and family. I wondered if whether me apologising for things that I didn’t need to be sorry for was something out of habit, if I was genuinely sorry or whatever it may be. My friend and I...

Growing up, especially in my last few years of high school, I’ve often heard that my genetic make-up of German and Irish genes put me in the category of somebody who can ‘take her drink’ - however, anybody that knows me knows that the the stereotypical images of a leprechaun downing pints of Guinness, or a Bavarian, dirndl-clad girl chugging two litre steins of Weißbeer do not really apply to me. Granted, I took part of the rite of passage of underage purchasing of cheap, off-brand Jagermeister from Centra with the terrible fake IDs supplied to us by a brother of a friend of a friend - how the cashiers turned a blind eye, I’ll never understand. I threw myself headfirst into the fresher’s week ritual of drinking as much free beer as humanly and physically possible, camping out at festivals in the pouring rain and digesting only 65 cent Aldi beer and bread. And yet, with all these...

I remember vividly the day I arrived in Amsterdam to start my life as a student – alone, completely lost, terrified and completely all over the place, classic Freya-in-a-stressy-situation style. The day was stifling hot; I had arrived mid-August during a heatwave and the height of tourist season, the hordes of people crowding around each other like ants eating a piece of food off the ground. I remember getting swindled by a taxi driver as he took me to my shitty, dismal apartment miles from the centre, I remember how I found half a gram of stale weed in my cupboard, how completely out of my depth I felt as this naïve 18-year-old in this new city. But I do know that I had this kitsch, flashing neon light in my head screaming at me, “THIS IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!”.

I don’t know exactly what I expected to occur as I started my life here. I realised that I was like a bird...

I’m going to say something that will probably make a lot of people roll their eyes. But I’ll be honest, as I will be as much as I can in this extended essay – I got inspired to do this from a podcast, one I was listening to in the park while I sat by myself on the hottest day of the year so far, taking notes in my notebook. This is probably the most millennial sentence I’ve written, but that really was the ‘bing!’ that went off in my head, that kicked me into gear, and to write this stuff down.
The podcast is called Happy Place by Fearne Cotton – my childhood idol now makes podcasts about love, life, sex, heartbreak and happiness. Can you imagine! In this podcast she chats to another hero of mine, Dolly Alderton, who’s book really inspired me to look at my life differently and to understand that the seemingly awful shit we go through at this age is not the end of the world, and most...

Growing up, I had the privilege of exploring a number of hobbies that my parents encouraged me to participate in. From the age of five onwards I was a ballet dancer, an artist, a singer, a gymnast, a swimmer. I threw myself into these activities with the obedience and high expectations my parents had instilled within me, determined to make my mark on the world in whatever thing I was going to excel in. I was destined for greatness, I told myself in the mirror each morning as I pulled on my leotard, my wetsuit, my theatre costume.

As many ten year olds to tweens experience, the thrill and excitement of a new hobby does not last long; I became overwhelmed with the amount of activities on offer, the need to excel at them all, to keep up with my friends who were becoming budding stars of tennis, dancing, skiing. When I realised that I couldn’t be absolutely amazing at all of them, my...