Design Education Must Redefine and Specialize

By Jon Kolko - October 11, 2010

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.

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