Design Education Must Redefine and Specialize

Design has been in a period of change for the last decade, but design education – and more specifically, design educators – just haven’t kept up. This is problematic and troubling for a number of reasons:

- Design students are continually learning tired and irrelevant methods and techniques
- Design graduates find themselves without either the breadth of relevance or the depth of expertise to get a job
- Students and parents generally fail to realize a “return on investment” in an increasingly expensive college education

Perhaps most fundamentally, the potential impact of thousands of well intentioned design students is not realized, as these individuals have the passion and cultural sensitivity necessary to take on large-scale social problems and gnarly business issues, but are not afforded the skills and methods necessary to appropriately engage.

It is at this moment of disconnect that design educators gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina for the New Contexts / New Practices conference, sponsored and supported by the AIGA, to explore the topic of emerging practices, and to dissect the changing conditions of design. At the heart of this exploration is a focus on actionable curricula changes and educational training for educators; it is not enough to simply point out that design education is broken without proposing a path forward. And multiple paths forward exist, yet all demand compromise, all provoke anxiety, and all imply a sense of “losers and winners”. Any changes to existing educational structures threaten people’s livelihood. But as AIGA's Executive Director Ric Grefe described in kicking off the conference, “If we don’t reach the ability to solve complex problems, we lose our relevance.”

Six provocations offered views on these complex problems, and I found two to be particularly interesting but for different reasons. Rick Robinson (whom you may remember as the founder of e-lab) described the need for designers to specialize – to become increasingly focused on a single path, because as he describes, “When I hire someone, I want an expert. Actually, I want lots of experts. I want someone who is exceptionally good, and I want them work together. And I want the magic in between them.” This is true at frog, as a review of an undergraduate portfolio all too often presents a picture of a generalist with no real actionable – and billable – skills. Rick goes on to call this the “ratification of the logic of disciplinarity”, and I find that to be compelling. Through this ratification comes a solidification of a core, and this core is what we must teach – “to have them learn to be extremely good at what it is they are doing rather than keep teaching them a lot of different things.”

I found David Thorburn’s provocation equally persuasive, and while not directly aligned with either my own viewpoints or Rick’s, I see a synthesis towards a new educational paradigm. David paints a picture of inevitable and irreversible technological advancement that is occurring around us, with a three-stage view of progression:

Phase 1 (which we are in now) is the phase of imitation and chaos. The new technologies “imitate their old in a mindless way” and slowly begin to develop a recognition of their own unique or special features. This is evident in the music industries’ ridiculous approach to both delivery and copyright, in the one-to-one mapping and then slow evolution of digital books, and in nearly every other consumer electronics available around us.

In David’s Phase two, stability is created, usually due to economic reasons and the decreasing cost of implementation. This stability is a time of technical advance, where it becomes possible to explore in a systematic way the features of the medium.

The final phase is the phase of maturity, where the technical advances are married to more and more advanced subject matter. But “the problem is that the phase of imitation and chaos seems so prolonged in our current situation that it appears to be unending. It appears that we may be living in this situation for a lot longer time, and this makes sense given the number of possibilities given by technological advancement.”

For me, the implications of the three phases on design education is, again, a push towards evolution of a core, specialization on the extremities, and simplification. For the complexities and chaos of technological advancement are the subject matter of design – the humanization of a culture that is driven by technology – and that subject matter is increasingly too large for a single designer to understand. That is not to say that a single designer can’t seamlessly move from mobile to consumer electronics to web; I find the complexity pivots along lines of execution and skills, rather than along issues of domain or content.

Increased complexity, and a need for experts to manage that complexity, and a demand for this vague “design thinking” while a huge push towards “design doing” – that seems to characterize the current demands of industry, and so it speaks to table-stakes for design education, which needs to satisfy this as well as unknown future trends and requirements. But as is the case with academia, educational and pedagogical changes and responses have been slow. While some of the delay is simply due to the nature of and difficulty in driving changes through curriculum council, the largest issue appears to be the additive qualities these shifts present in terms of subject matter, methods, theory, and implications – and the reluctance of educators to give up what they learned, and have been teaching, for decades to make room for new material. As is the case in every subject that advances, the body of knowledge that makes up the specific discipline of design has increased steadily, and so the ability to teach and learn it effectively needs to grow, or otherwise change, to keep pace.

The skills that are increasingly in demand fall in three main categories: execution, intellectual, and interpersonal. Executional skills are well defined methods or techniques that can be easily applied in various circumstances or situations. Intellectual skills are processes or approaches that are learned and refined largely through personal experience. Interpersonal skills are focused on the relationship a designer has with other people.

Executional
Ability to generate scenarios or narratives about people in situations
Ability to develop front-end code for user interfaces
Ability to conduct qualitative research
Ability to conduct quantitative research
Ability to conduct evaluative research, such as usability testing
Ability to conduct generative research, such as through participatory design
Ability to describe a system, interaction, or service through a diagram

Intellectual
Ability to look at a situation critically
Ability to look at context from an analytical perspective
Ability to approach a multi-faceted problem in a methodical manner
Ability to reframe a problem or opportunity from a new perspective

Interpersonal
Ability to build meaningful relationships with other people, quickly
Ability to empathize with another individual
Ability to collaborate with other disciplines
Ability to facilitate conversations
Ability to facilitate creative activities
 

These skills are only a subset of the new demands facing practicing designers, and speak to the dramatic repositioning of design that’s occurred over the last ten years, from a craft-based specialty to a more intellectually demanding discipline. Interestingly, these skills are in demand (and have been, for the last decade) both by corporations struggling to apply “design thinking” to their businesses and avoid commoditization, and by social entrepreneurs who are focused on tackling the large-scale social problems that have developed throughout the course of history (such as poverty, access to clean drinking water, and equality of education).

While some schools have been teaching these things for decades (CMU and IIT, for example), there is now an opportunity for the breadth of design education to change in order to respond to the above shifts, and to better prepare students for the realities they will face as they graduate from college or university – to better educate students in the executional, intellectual, and interpersonal skills described above. Design education needs to wholesale redefine what “foundations” means, and then drive towards deep specialization. Future success for designers lies not in a generalist approach to creativity, but in highly unique, refined skills that provide value for a multidisciplinary team of other specialists.

Because the feasibility of an extended program of even five or six years is unlikely in many institutions, it’s necessary to dramatically reframe – and in some cases, outright reject – traditional foundation work in order to allow time for students to specialize with a depth of ability, and to create a portfolio that demonstrates abilities within that specialization. A foundation course should provide students with a depth in process and introduce the ideas of “design thinking”, as popularly described – an empathetic approach of curiosity and learning that demands rapid prototyping (often in a digital medium) and the ability to solve problems with “just enough data.” This means teaching this material at a foundation level instead of two dimensional design, three dimensional design, typography, color theory, and composition – not in addition to these skills. Later specialization allows the student to take on topics of design research, system design, UI design, design theory, or facilitation – or typography, color theory, or any of the other “traditional” aspect of design.

This approach challenges a number of traditions, and introduces hardships for experienced faculty. To be direct and explicit, educators who have taught foundations studies will need to dramatically revamp their courses or face irrelevance. Educators who have repeated the same tired typography and hierarchy exercises for years may find themselves teaching something so arcane that it is without audience, and tenure not-withstanding, these individuals may find themselves without a role. But this new approach will provide competent designers to industry, to government, and to the non-profit sector, where design thinking and detailed, deep, knowledgeable design-doing is fundamental to address the complex and dynamic qualities of our world.

This approach also acknowledges that the topics of specialization will continue to evolve and change. The subject matter of design is the humanization of technology, and as long as technological advancements continues, so too will the pragmatic and day to day jobs of designers continue to morph.

I’ll be publishing a paper on this topic, with more detail and a more thorough analysis and summary of educator next-steps, in interactions magazine. In the meantime, I hope design educators will embrace the challenge of redefining both their courses and themselves, with an eye towards a completely refocused core and a dramatic push towards specialization.