This is the last seminar before the bachelor thesis, and the framing is different from anything I've done before. The previous five seminars were about opening things. New methods, new positions, new mentors, new projects. This one is about closing.

The work is the digital nomad project I started in Seminar 5. The HMW questions are written. The personas exist. The field research is done. What's missing is the part most personal projects of mine never reach, which is the ending.

I came in with one honest priority. Finish it.

I asked Roman Sellner Novotný to mentor me for the second time. The first time was PulseNest, where he taught me what speculative design actually does in a room. This time I needed something different. I needed someone who already understood how I work, so we could skip the first month of getting acquainted and use the time on the actual decisions.

That choice was strategic. With a project this open, the worst thing I could do was spend a semester explaining context to a new mentor.

I have a habit I've named in earlier reflections. I do everything at the last minute, and personal projects often stay unfinished in a drawer. The seminars helped me get better at that, but the bachelor thesis is the test. Nobody can hand me a tighter deadline than the one I would normally avoid.

The format of the final output is genuinely undecided. It could be a workshop run with real nomads. It could be a service concept. It could be a set of speculative artefacts. The decision isn't made yet, and Roman is the right person to help me make it without panicking into the wrong format too early.

"Pick the format the work needs, not the format you're comfortable defending."

That sentence isn't a direct quote, but it's roughly the standard I'm trying to hold myself to.

I'm running the semester in three phases.

The first is sharpening. Going back into the discovery work from Seminar 5 and making sure the HMW questions still hold, that the personas haven't aged, and that the most painful insight from the field research is at the centre of whatever comes next.

The second is choosing. With Roman, picking the format. A workshop, a service, an artefact set, or something hybrid. The criterion isn't ambition. It's what the research actually demands.

The third is building. Whatever the format, the deliverable has to exist by the end of the bachelor thesis. Not as a concept I could have built. As a thing that exists in the world.

The interesting part of this semester is that the lesson isn't waiting for the end. It's already happening in the structure.

Discovery is the part of design I'm naturally good at. New territory, sensitive interviews, finding the pattern in messy field notes. Closing is where I'm weakest. Picking the format. Cutting options. Defending the choice instead of keeping all doors open. The bachelor thesis is forcing me into the muscle I haven't trained.

If I finish well, the project will be the deliverable. If I finish badly, the deliverable will still be the lesson. Both have value. Only one of them is the reason I came to this seminar.