On my last day at work, I cycle to J&R’s studio in Gent where I do my internship with a bicycle that I temporarily rented. I lock the bicycle at the parking spot where everybody does. I cycle other peoples’ routes, other peoples’ commutes. I am a visitor on someone else’s morning. These daily routines will come to an end and I will go back to the Netherlands where I feel more familiar. Mobility provides the possibility to go to any destination I wish. To live, to study, and to work. Internships are seen as an investment in creative individuals even though we are often unpaid or underpaid. The system of the internship feeds us the illusion of autonomy. Waving my flag of individual liberty, I choose to ignore finance, precarity, and others by claiming the freedom to do my own thing. I embrace the fantasy of free individuality.

As a designer, we become more internationally mobile and uncertainty becomes our new normal for living and working in very flexible and hybrid time. In General Theory of the Precariat: Great Recession, Revolution, Reaction, Alex Foti points out “the youth is indeed underpaid, under-employed and under-protected, but also over-educated and therefore over-exploited, young, mainly urban and multicultural.”⁽¹⁵⁾ This ideology forces us to go through our lives as lone freelancers, to celebrate our personal freedom and be more autonomous. Students and freelancers are like “micro-entrepreneurs, who are faced with improving their entrepreneurial minds.”⁽¹⁶⁾ Is liberation a blessing, or a curse? To ensure our mobility and autonomy we must create our own space and orient our own paths. How can designers stay autonomous, and keep our creativity alive in a flexible and hybrid era?