In today’s world, innovation is everywhere and is changing the way we live. From ordering a taxi to building a business, our capacity to influence the world around us is literally at our fingertips.

When it comes to design thinking, however, only a few of us have the same conviction. In fact, many may have nothing more than a vague understanding of what design actually is — let alone why it’s important.

In the past, when we spoke about design, we were probably referring to a drawing, sketch or outline of a physical product. Design was the domain of the artists, who are at the other end of the intellectual corridor to scientists and inventors, who, by contrast, are only concerned with the objective realm of fact.

Today, however, design thinking is systematically breaking down these traditional barriers. After all, as Steve Jobs famously reminded us: It is naive to think about the design of a product just in terms of how it looks. It’s just as much about how it actually works.

The emerging importance of design as something that links form and content is showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, Mike Treff, Managing Partner in product design at the leading design company Code and Theory predicts:

But if this is true, and design thinking is no longer something we do in art lessons on a Friday afternoon, we must answer some questions. What are the implications for schools? What are the conceptual understandings, competencies and character traits that students will need to develop across all subject areas?

Rachel Minnery is an architect activist for sustainable futures and the Director of Built Environment Policy at the American Institute of Architects. For her, the way forward is clear.

“Students will need to become developers — identifying the funding and resources to realize their own projects. Learning aspects of planning, economics, law, communications, marketing and business skills are essential to this, in addition to learning problem-seeking and creative exploration.”

In other words, the future of education will be one where students learn to think differently across different subject areas; understand their potential to shape and disrupt the world around them; and recognise their responsibility as architects and creators of solutions to a wide range of new social, political and economic realities.

In short, when we talk about design, it’s not so much that schools are re-thinking design, but redesigning thinking.

The International School of Brussels (ISB) is preparing students for a world that will require innovative solutions to problems that we have yet to identify. Students will need to know how to devise creative responses to these challenges. The skills of creativity, problem-finding, problem-solving, design thinking, communication and innovation lie at the heart of ISB’s Common Ground Curriculum and will be the key to this future.

Is design education failing its students? How big is the gulf between education and industry – and are graduates equipped to hit the real world running?

These are just three of many huge questions marks hanging over design education in the UK. Here, six leading creative professionals debate what's wrong with higher education – and suggest what they would do to fix it…

According to Neville Brody, dean at the School of Communication, Royal College of Art, design education needs more support from the Government.

"Design is key to our economic and cultural future, and must be taught at every level of education," he says. "Government should be funding – not penalising – art and design education. We should engage with science, engineering, technology, information design, art, society, communication and commerce. We have the knowledge, history, vision and adventure to innovate, so let us grab the opportunity!'

"We've stopped respecting design education," says Gemma Germains, creative strategist at Well Made Studio. "We expect colleges to teach employability and blame them when graduates fail to find fulfilling roles. Most work in the industry is very dull. We need to stop pretending it isn't. Then our youngest talent can use education for its true purpose: to imagine and create better alternatives."

Hamish Muir is co-founder of 8vo and British studio MuirMcNeil. He's also a part-time lecturer. For him, the problem is deep-rooted: "In a word: university. And in some other words: professional educators; pedagogues; quality assurance; a funding model that inhibits studio-based activities."

"Re-establish independent design schools. Abolish foundation courses. Create four-year courses. Make the first year of study free – teach drawing, colour, composition and basic design skills, five days a week, studio-based, attendance mandatory. Only students with the appropriate aptitude and attitude would progress beyond year one."

"I'd get students to master as many skills as possible, and fail them if they didn’t," says Rian Hughes, director at device fonts. "I'd train students to brainstorm a dozen viable ideas in 30 minutes, not two weeks. Is that too harsh? Maybe – but in one of my first jobs out of the cosseted world of art college, having taken a few days to doodle ideas, I was taken aside and told: 'Rian, if you can't give me a dozen usable ideas in a morning, you’re no use to me.'"

"I would like to see students better prepared for the practical aspects of working as a designer," suggests Holly Karlsson, director of Shillington School (US).

"How you sell your ideas, use written agreements to protect yourself, maintain schedules, manage budgets and hit deadlines. Most of us learnt these lessons as we went along, learning from our mistakes. Though these skills might not be of immediate concern for a junior, they are fundamental to the industry."

Filmmaker and author Paul Wyatt is an advocate of real-world experience: "There's isn't anything 'wrong' with design education," he reasons. "It's just that it can't replicate the motivating fear of a client deadline, or the experience of working in an industry with people of different ages, abilities and opinions."

Watch Paul Wyatt's film The Workshop which documents an attempt to bridge the gap between academia and the creative industry.

By Creative Review 11 March 2016

 

Furniss has spoken to key designers and figures in the design world including Thomas Heatherwick, Ron Arad, Punchdrunk, Jason Bruges Studio, Assemble, Nat Hunter, Tim Lindsay, and Lynda Relph-Knight to gauge how design practice and design education are evolving.

 

In the following text, she identifies a certain set of skills common to all successful studios – including agility, iteration, collaboration, embracing failure, taking risks, and having transferable skills – which are currently all difficult to experience within design courses at university. She then suggests how universities can better embrace these skills – and also explains why it is vital to the industry that they do. But to open, she lays out the case in bald terms of why UK design education is currently failing.

 

Why is undergraduate design education not working?

 

Government policy on creative education is a key driver in why undergraduate education is not working, writes Lara Furniss. Negative impact on creative education, particularly at secondary level, is already being seen, with creative subjects either being cut or regarded as inferior. This then impacts on students entering higher education. With less exposure to creative subjects before higher education, new students have less design knowledge, while still being expected to choose one specific discipline and career path.

 

The introduction of higher fees has turned universities into financial institutions, with many knock-on effects. The biggest challenge within studios is how to maintain a unique creative process and grow at the same time. Yet universities are insisting on growth of student numbers to meet financial targets, which restricts creative teaching methods. When students face taking on such debt they, understandably, want reassurance that they will get a job at the end. The easiest way to give this reassurance is to clearly label the ‘tin’ that they are buying. This perpetuates the one-discipline structure, when there is no guarantee that the ‘tin’ will even exist in five years time.

 

University systems are another driver in why undergraduate education is not working. It is difficult to teach an ever-evolving practice within a rigid university system that is more likely designed for health or law. Use of space is a key example. Space plays a major role in the studios, with the workshop always at the heart. To work in a truly agile, iterative, collaborative way, universities need to replicate this by physically bringing students together. The easiest way to break down disciplinary barriers and encourage transferrable skills is to place architects next to fashion designers next to metal workers next to computer illustrators. But space in universities is usually segregated and at a premium, with departments fighting for room bookings and students hot-desking.

 

The need for agility

 

Working in an agile way is a key characteristic of all the studios I spoke to. They are not pinned down by rules or conventions and are flexible and fluid in their methods. For studio members, breaking the rules during their time in education was also a key driver. Members describe creating the education they wanted for themselves rather than accepting what was on offer. For example, going on long periods of work placement when they were supposed to be in university, or taking on ten roles in a project when they were expected to only choose one and were only assessed for one.

Universities revolve around outdated prescriptive rules which make student agility difficult. Because students are paying so much for their education, they have little confidence to break rules. Also, when degree courses are only revalidated and redesigned once every four years, it is almost impossible for them to be agile and keep up with industry’s constant role re-definition, process re-invention, and evolution.

 

If at first you don’t succeed

 

Rigorous questioning and iteration, going back to the beginning again and again to perfect the end result, is another common part of the creative process of design studios. It requires a considerable amount of extra time, which is worked into schedules. With restricted university deadlines and modular structures, students can only iterate for so long before having to fix on a solution and move on to the next project. Rigorous questioning, reworking and testing are also more difficult when students don’t have a real client or audience.

 

Collaboration

Real design studios simply cannot function without intense, constant internal and external collaboration. Collaboration happens at university, but it is usually confined to the same course or department. Challenges include meeting the assessment criteria and restricted timetabling.

 

Embracing failure and taking risks

 

Research and development plays a critical role in studios, enabling exploration of new ideas, taking risks and making mistakes. They see the value in failure and believe making mistakes is how you learn best. Students see no value in failing and making mistakes as their prior education has been all about succeeding. When fees are so high, breaking down that inherent pressure to succeed is a challenge.

 

Not being defined by discipline

 

Ask design studio members to define themselves and their studios and most will take a deep breath, as what they do is not easy to define. Their work is not neatly compartmentalised into one clearly defined discipline. Our undergraduate education system is based on restrictive siloes, and the dividing walls are both physically and psychologically difficult to break down.

 

Transferable skills

No two projects are ever the same in studios, and members’ skills are constantly shifting from one creative challenge to another. It is vital for students to understand that their developing creative skills and design thinking can transfer not only between disciplines, but also beyond design into other sectors. To achieve this the goals set within universities need to break the silo walls with briefs posing issues-based problems rather than discipline-focused solutions.

 

So what are best ways into the industry for students who eventually want to work in design?

Life in the 21st century is dependent on young people choosing design education, as creative people are needed to solve life’s problems. To enter the industry, apply for courses with broad ranging models that better reflect the skills and processes needed to meet the challenges of the coming decades. Independent art schools are more agile and not constrained by rigid university systems. Europe offers cheaper university fees for many courses that better reflect 21st century design practice. Explore alternative creative opportunities, join local creative groups or workshops, volunteer with creative studios, makers and organisations.

 

School is hard. Design school is especially hard because so much of it exists within the abstract, the opinion. There are few, if any, absolutes as you go through design school. Much of design education is about learning some key techniques and then trying to apply them to your work in interesting ways. The following are some thoughts I have about how to go through a design program and get the most out of the experience, and beyond as a creative professional.

Always take risks.

 

It is easy to learn and then repeat exactly what you have learned. However, you will not grow that way. I can see value in the regurgitation of knowledge if you are a lawyer, but I have a hard time with it as a design student or a creative professional. You should be pushing yourself and you should be taking risks, especially in school. Big risks. Trying what may not work. Asking questions that may not have answers. Seeing if what you throw against the wall sticks. In my experience, taking risks in school has always paid off big time.

Be aggressive.

 

There are many opportunities available while in design school. For example: collaborative projects, extracurricular activities, and freelance work. These opportunities will not always come to you, you must go get them. Every school has a publications department that designs and produces internal and external collateral. There is no reason that you should not be the person designing these projects. Make contacts and ask for work. If you are talented and a little lucky, you will get it.

 

Be aggressive in terms of your academics as well. There are two kinds of design professors at school: pushers and pullers. Some professors will push their knowledge on you. Others will make you pull what you need from them. Ask questions of both. Challenge their statements. Ask for precedents. Beyond the curriculum of the class, ask your favorite faculty who they know that needs an intern (because they do know people, I assure you). Ask faculty if they need any assistance with their own work. Find out which exhibits they enjoyed at local museums. It is very important that as a design student you do not sit back and let things happen to you. Be aggressive and create your own luck and opportunities.

Break the rules.

 

I lecture to my students that they should “fuck the rules” as long as they have a good reason. I have consistently found that the students who are conservative, stay inside the lines and try to appeal to the teacher, are the students who do the most predictable work. Not bad work, just predictable. Defying the rules forces you to stray from the path of least resistance and ultimately make work that is more interesting, more meaningful and more fun to create.

 

But, that does not mean just be a contrarian for its own sake. It does not mean ignore any and all guidelines. It means take the requirements into consideration and break past them with good reasons and solid ideas. Breaking the rules just to be different is foolish, breaking the rules because you have a much better idea is smart.

Look at everything. Dismiss nothing.

 

Each designer is born from a unique experience. Classmates in the same program will have different educations depending on which teachers they have, what field trips they take, and what books they pick up. As a designer you need to always be looking at the world around you. You need to see everything—the kind of detailed seeing taught in freshman drawing classes—not just looking, but really seeing. You need to be an observer as well as a maker. You should rid yourself of any preconceptions of what is and is not worthy of your attention. Everything has potential to be interesting and influential. Not everything will be, but the more you see the better your chances are at seeing something that will be useful to you.

Be obsessive.

 

The saying goes that “necessity is the mother of invention.” I concur, but I think for designers the saying should be “obsession is the mother of invention.” Obsession is what drives you to explore and find out as much as possible about something that interests you. I do not mean that being clinically obsessive/compulsive is something to aspire to—I have been told that is neither fun or interesting—but I do mean you need to be intensely immersed and engaged in what you are doing. This obsession can move you past understanding and awareness into a translative process where you will start to make things. We are usually taught that obsession is unhealthy, and in some cases that is true. When it comes to how a designer looks at the world, obsession can provide an incredible explosion of ideas as you become so engrossed in something you start to reinvent it inside your head. Obsession can often help you to move through the threshold between thinking and making. You should never hold back your excitement about something that interests you, and by the same token, you should not hesitate to be obsessive about many things since you never know where your interests will lead.

Be uncomfortable.

 

Comfort is tremendously overrated, especially as a designer. You know you can skew some type, add some color, toss in an image and make a decent piece of design. Maybe it's not great, but it's good enough. It is easy to get into the habit of making the kind of work you are comfortable making. Truly great, interesting, inspiring design comes not from comfort but from discomfort. It comes from the fear that what you are doing might really suck, but it also might just be brilliant. Discomfort makes you reexamine what you think you know and how you think things should work. Being uncomfortable helps you make decisions from the gut, it makes you push harder and take more risks. Grabbing that fear, holding onto that uncomfortable, scary place lets you push past expectations and into the unknown—into a process of discovery as opposed to regurgitation.

Be opinionated.

 

You should have opinions about design and the world around you. Preferably, you should have strong opinions. Ideally, you should have strong and informed opinions. Every great designer I have ever met has an active stance on design, they do not passively allow work to wash over them. They have opinions about what they see. Having opinions means engaging in some kind of internal analysis of the work you see and formulating a response to it. As an educator I do this constantly in the classroom, and I try to do it constantly in the professional world as well. Opinions about design force you to pick a side, and define what kind of designer you are.

 

There are plenty of designers out there who punch a clock in the morning, mindlessly flow some text into InDesign all day, and then leave at five and don’t think about design until the next morning. There are designers who casually ignore art and design while they look for the next reality show on TV. Then there are the other designers who make more design in their spare time. Their idea of a good time is to look at typography or experiment with painting or photography. These are designers who are fully immersed in working visually, designers who are actively engaged in becoming better at what they do every day.

Be a cop.

 

They say that when you are a police officer you are on duty 24/7/365. Cops always look at their surroundings from a cop's perspective. They notice things others do not. They act as a cop would in an emergency situation whether or not they are in uniform. Most cops I have met and read about always carry their firearms and badge, even while on vacation. It is not something they turn off at the end of their shift.

 

A designer needs to act like a cop. When you are a designer, you are a designer 24/7/365. Always noticing, always observing, always designing, even if only in your head. Carrying a camera with you at all times is a good habit—capture interesting details you come across, not just because you have an assignment due, but because it is in your nature as a visual artist to observe and process the world around you. Inspiration comes from everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.

 

One of the greatest things about being a designer is that you do not finish your design education when you leave design school. You continue learning for the rest of you life, and you should carry these ideas with you as you develop and mature into a creative professional.

Design to Improve Life Education is a framework developed in cooperation with teachers, didactic experts, facilitation experts and designers from Denmark and Sweden. Its methods derive from knowledge about global challenges (e.g. food waste, climate change and over-population), design processes and a vast catalogue of design solutions – and more than 1.000 teachers and 10.000 kids have already tested the methods successfully.

Benefits for kids and youth
In classrooms, students experience greater satisfaction and relevance if their learning processes are meaningful and motivating. This happens when they cooperate about understanding challenges from their everyday lives in a constructive, solution-oriented and energetic way, and subsequently work towards creating (better) solutions to these challenges.

Benefits for teachers
Design to Improve Life Education gives teachers and pedagogues the opportunity to create goal-oriented frameworks across all subjects by training them to lead structured, inclusive, differential and creative learning processes.

Via the primary tool, the Design to Improve Life Compass, teachers can develop and change processes to make them correspond with specific interests, learning outcomes and subjects.

Ultimately, Design to Improve Life Education enables teachers to structure the creative process in order to meet a growing demand for innovation in society.

Benefits for decision makers
Design to Improve Life Education can help private and public decision makers to develop better solutions by understanding society’s challenges, while minimizing risks and taking advantage of the possibilities at hand.

Navigating
The Design to improve Life Challenge is a thematic, overarching teaching concept for schools.

In the submenu:

This change in the role of designers has been emphasized with the popularization of the term design thinking, which has generated deep interest in the way designers do things among non-design communities (e.g. business, marketing, engineering). This is also having a strong impact in design education: greater demand for becoming a designer is generating multiple options for students and professionals to learn designers’ way of thinking and skills. For example, there is a quite diverse range of design-related courses and workshops imparted by universities and by private professional organisations which focus on design processes and thinking approaches (e.g. design thinking), design fundamentals (e.g. graphic design, typography) and on more specialised fields (e.g. information design, service design, user experience design). Another huge change in education has been the addition of design-related courses (still mostly as elective courses) to cross-disciplinary university programmes like computer science, law, psychology, economics and engineering.
While this wave is bringing design closer to a wider population, it is also creating new needs that should be folded into the education of future generations of designers to help them be adequately equipped.

Rethinking Content & Skills

Until recently, design has been mostly taught in artistic or architecture contexts to students with a certain baseline preparation or knowledge assessed through some kind of portfolio. Teaching the same content to non-design students involves different challenges. At the same time, the new role of design is demanding much more specialised skills than those of a purely visual and technical syllabus. All this indicates that design education should be prepared for these new demands: How can design be taught in a non-design environment? How should these courses be taught? What contents should be included in their syllabi? What other key content should be included? What theories or frameworks should now be the most relevant ones?

These are some areas of design education that may require attention:

In some countries, education is open to any student of the world (who can afford it). This brings cultural components also into the equation of education. Culture influences teaching in many ways. Some key cultural components to consider are students’ way of thinking, universities/colleges history and traditions, countries’ idiosyncrasy, and education system approaches. Recently, I watched ‘Some Kind of Beautiful’, which although it isn’t the deepest movie, it does communicate this cultural component of teaching very clearly. Pierce Brosnan plays the character of a very successful and experienced English teacher who relocates in Los Angeles for personal reasons. Initially, he finds a teaching job in a community college where he struggles to connect with and motivate American students in his class. He soon realises the huge cultural difference between British and American cultures. While in England, his classes were crowded and students were enjoying every aspect of them, the picture was a very different one in America. Towards the end of the movie, he decides to change his teaching strategy and learn more about the students’ interests, until eventually he reverts the situation and finds his dream job.

The point reflected in the movie is particularly relevant in design education. The meaning of shapes, colours, icons may dramatically vary (or even be the opposite) from one culture to another. At the same time, the frequent use of references from a country’s design history may not be relevant or known for students who did not grow up in that country.

Design, like other disciplines, demands the learning of specialized knowledge. To avoid design being taken away from designers, we need to make sure that future generations are as well prepared and equipped as they can be. For that design teachers and educators should be fully prepared too to adequately train these designers. And also design professionals should be constantly revising their tool kits to make sure they have the key skills they need to tackle emerging needs.

Skills. When you volunteer, you might come away from the experience knowing how to do just about anything – it really just depends on the kind of volunteer work you’re doing. Builders for Habitat for Humanity learn a number of skills related to house-building, including carpentry and teamwork, but those who volunteer in other departments might learn transferable skills in administration, marketing, leadership, and more. Chances are, if you can think of a skill you might need in the workforce, it’s something that you might be expected to do somewhere as a volunteer.

Experience. Knowledge and skills are great, but what’s especially powerful about volunteer work is that, depending on the kind of activities you were engaged in, many employers look at almost as another type of job experience. Cooking in a soup kitchen for a year is great experience for someone looking to make meals in the food industry, especially if you can add to it some formal training in the classroom. In fact, this kind of experience can be incredibly important in times like this where jobs are scarce and it’s difficult to get an entry level position to get the work experience you need.

Joy. How can you beat the smiles of an entire village in Africa after you dig a well that will provide them with drinkable water for the next three generations? Or the tears of happiness shed by a family after you fix their home that was ravaged by a storm? Or the look of relief on the face of a mother as you hand her Christmas gifts so that she doesn’t have to tell her children that they won’t be getting anything that year?

Wait, aren’t those “selfless” things? Not if we’re talking about how they make you feel. It’s great that the people you’re helping are happy, but their feelings can’t help but give you a sense of pride, accomplishment and, yes, joy as you marvel at what you did and how great of a person you are – and that’s not me being facetious!

Perspective. No one has an easy life, but if you ever start feeling like the world is out to get you and sabotage your success or happiness, I recommend volunteering. Nothing puts things in perspective quite like seeing families dig through dumpsters together or be thankful that they have a roof over their heads even though they live in a shantytown in Brazil where each family’s “house” is little more than a metal box. Most volunteers end up heading for home happier than when they arrive if for no other reason than they are thankful for all that they now realize they have.

Ask for recommendations. Almost everyone’s network is overweight with people like themselves – so take advantage of this fact, and if you’re looking to diversify your professional relationships, ask the people who are outliers in your network to recommend people they think you should meet. You could say to them, “I’d like to know more angel investors, and you’re really plugged into those circles – who else do you think I should connect with? Would you be willing to make an introduction?”

Don’t look for immediate returns. Some people end up with a narrow network because of inertia, but others don’t extend themselves because they just don’t see the potential for return. If you work in finance, it’s true that making friends with a filmmaker is less likely to add to your bottom line than spending time with someone in your own industry. But you have to play the long game. People — including you — may change careers, and that connection may prove helpful down the line. Additionally, you can’t predict who will be in someone else’s network; that filmmaker may have gone to high school with a CEO you’d now like to do business with.

The best reason to build a professionally diverse network, however, isn’t about what you’ll get out of those relationships. It’s to fulfill personal curiosity and develop yourself as a person; professional or monetary ROI is a happy coincidence. For several years, I’ve been hosting 8-10 person dinner gatherings of interesting people from a mix of professions. It didn’t seem relevant that one of my friends was a comedian, and another a comedy promoter, until I started doing standup performances and was able to access helpful advice that saved me time and frustration.

It’s easy to coast through life only connecting with people like ourselves — but by expending the extra effort to increase our “bridging capital,” we’re gaining access to new insights and creating more “career insurance” for ourselves by broadening the ranks of people who know, like, and respect our work.