The role of designers nowadays has changed significantly, as design simultaneously both broadens and specializes. On the one hand, it grows to be more interdisciplinary, designers finding themselves within unexpected industries; while on the other hand, the number of design fields is so vast, it is not enough to make up your mind to simply ‘go into design’, you have to be more specific and decide what your path in design will be – branding or digital design, design of experiences or design or strategic design. The question arises: should modern designers be trained as specialists or generalists? Should they choose to be a jack of all trades or aim to deliver well-crafted products based on their focused expertise?
There are different opinions on this among design leaders. Chris Thelwell, winning design director and digital product innovator, admits his company looks for generalists when they hire, preferring to have a team built from generalists who can handle any design task. “We need people who have a wide range of skills”, he writes. “One day they can be doing user research—interviewing customers, writing surveys, analyzing results, etc.—and the next day they’ll be doing interaction work and visual design”. This approach helps Thelwell to overcome quite a number of issues, making the team more efficient without designers waiting around for the next task that required their specialization. Having on board designers with strong multidisciplinary skills lessens loss of context on projects during handoffs as well as helps to build a stronger relationship with the development team.
Uday Gajendar, UX-consultant, speaker and writer, who used to teach Design Fundamentals at San Jose State University, appeals to novice designers to strike a balance between generalist and specialist. He believes, in the field of design it is not about one versus the other, the spectrum of possibilities being much wider. Gajendar suggests the optimal middle strategy for those who aspire to be a design leader with legitimacy and credibility among non-designers: “Think (strategize) like a generalist, and make (deliver) like a specialist.”
To strike this balance, Gajendar suggests enabling deep analysis of the problem and potential solutions. For this he advises to get diversified knowledge across a range of design-related topics, situations, or modalities, draw inspirations from a multitude of sources: history, politics, philosophy, even science fiction and cinema, as well as think like a generalist when dealing with product management and engineering.
However, the value of a deep and focused specialist who delivers can’t be ignored. “Proving that you can deliver what you’re paid to do (in the superficial, unknowing eyes of non-designers) is the key to your success at a basic level, and it serves as a stepping stone towards greater influence and impact down the road,” Gajendar highlights. Especially when it is blended with generalist thinking about the essence of the problem. Supporting this way of thinking, the global design company IDEO came up with the term “T-shaped designer,” which is a person who has deep knowledge about a single expertise but understands general ideas across a broad range of topics.
So, T-shaped designers are in demand, and design education needs to react. A design student’s knowledge cannot be any longer limited to the elements and principles of design, as innovative designer jobs require an interdisciplinary approach. Don Norman, the father of UX, is certain that “to deal with today’s large, complex problems, design education needs to change to include multiple disciplines, technology, art, the social sciences, politics, and business.”
According to Jordan DeVos, designer and strategist who used to work in Central Saint Martins – University of the Arts London, the Royal College of Art, a world-renowned design university in London, has recently announced its reimagined curriculum—one that spans far beyond design as a discipline and offers design students such areas of study as environmental architecture and nanotechnology. “The world is too complex and interconnected for designers to not be versed in a variety of disciplines.”
But what do universities have to offer to those seeking expertise and tangible specialized skills? Do established schools leave this to hyper-specialized non-traditional education?
Exploring this, Meg Miller of Eye on Design magazine published by AIGA, America’s oldest association of professionals for design, reports that incoming college students today have a higher level of exposure to design than in the past. According to John Caserta, an associate professor at Rhode Island School of Design, this results in students coming to school already with strong opinions about design and what they want to learn. At RISD, this has led the design program to expand elective options to include more classes in specialized skills like UX design, software development, interaction design, and form-making. They’ve also added to the curriculum four-week-long workshops to learn things like Risograph printing, calligraphy, or digital design. Similarly, CalArts have developed their Open Learning initiative, which offers to the broader public free, no-credit online courses ranging from typography to digital arts to game design.
With generalist/specialist balance in mind, RISD also offers incoming students to take a foundational year and a half, during which they will be exposed to different kinds of design and gain a more expansive understanding of the field, before they choose which one to specialize in. “A four-year undergraduate degree is a significant commitment, financially and time-wise, but there’s so much that comes along with that in terms of community and finding yourself,” says Caserta.
As Don Norman puts it, “design is not about interacting with a computer; it’s about interacting with the world.” Choosing a straight and narrow path weakens one in the long run, making them less valuable as a designer.
