Author: Lilia Valieva

For a last few years, Design Thinking has been a buzzword in the world of design. Since design itself is no longer just for physical objects, Design Thinking is being applied to abstract entities, such as systems and services, as well as to devise strategies, manage change and solve complex problems. Some enthusiasts even have been pushing this methodological framework as a way to reform higher education and other fundamental social institutions. However, not everyone feels this way. We explore the value and defects of this engaging way of working.

In its most basic description, Design Thinking is a decision-making method that seeks to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine different issues in the effort to think of alternative solutions that are successful and often creative in unpredictable ways.

Tim Brown, CEO of design consultancy IDEO, best known for pioneering this expanded view of design beyond products, defines it as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success”. In this way, the methodical framework product designers have used is applicable to business strategy and complex, multidisciplinary problems.

Today, the technique has proven effective in a much broader context, including transformation of corporate cultures at PepsiCo and Samsung, establishment of new public school systems in Peru, and improving access to economic resources in Mongolia, transportation in India, and community building in low-income neighbourhoods in the U.S.

Design Thinking can be traced back to foundational thinkers like the cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate for economics Herbert Simon and the designer Robert McKim. The architect and urban designer Peter Rowe, who eventually became the dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, was one of the first people to popularize the term in his 1987 book, Design Thinking. The 1980s brought the rise of human-centered design and the rise of design-centered business management. While teaching design principles to engineering students at Stanford University, Professor David M. Kelley, founder of IDEO, noticed that the principles he taught were often misunderstood and undervalued. His students complained that graduates with more narrow, specific content knowledge in sub-disciplines, such as electrical engineering or mechanical engineering, seemed to get better starting jobs in industry than those who developed an expertise in complex systems design. His students felt that after mastering the principles of design, they were not “experts” at anything that was valued.  In response to these challenges, Kelley explained that his students were experts in a new way of “thinking”. He called this Design Thinking, and it caught on.

At present, Design Thinking is often associated with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or the d.school.  Founded by Kelley at the Stanford School of Design in 2004 as a graduate program that integrates business, the social sciences, the humanities and other disciplines into more traditional engineering and product design, d.school made the development, teaching and implementation of Design Thinking one of its own central goals since its inception.

In 2018 alone, the d.school offered more than 80 courses (most of them oversubscribed), enrolling 1,250 students from all disciplines. Some courses are lectures, others offer bench work or sitting around tables; some are for a full 10 weeks and others, “pop-up” courses, for four weeks or sometimes only for a weekend. All of them are team-taught by up to six instructors from different disciplinary and professional backgrounds, despite the fact that the d.school has no dedicated faculty of its own. All courses involve coursework based on problem solving and are designed for teams of students to work collaboratively to find solutions. While design schools elsewhere emphasize traditional product design, d.school sees its mission “to equip students with a methodology for producing reliably innovative results in any field.”

As the interest in spreading Design Thinking methodology throughout other disciplines is growing, John L. Hennessey, President of Stanford University, asked Kelley to try to find a way to make it possible for all Stanford graduates, not only those interested in design or engineering, to develop a competency in Design Thinking. This resulted in two new classes for undergraduates:  “Designing Your Life,” which aims to help upperclassmen think about the decisions that will shape their lives after graduating, and “Designing Your Stanford,” which applies Design Thinking to help first- and second-year students make the best choices about courses, majors, and extracurricular activities. Both are popular.

The courses offered in DT are quite costly. IDEO’s self-paced, video-based Design Thinking course, “Insights for Innovation” is available for $599, while Stanford’s online 4-day “Design Thinking Bootcamp” is $13,000.

The Design Thinking movement is gaining ground rapidly, and other prestigious universities, business schools and forward thinking companies choose to follow the paths pioneered by IDEO and d.school by adopting the methodology to varying degrees, sometimes re-interpreting it to suit their specific context or brand values. For example, Boston College also received advice to use Design Thinking in a pervasive way. In a series of more recent articles, the Harvard Business Review documents the growing influence of Design Thinking in business and society.

K-12 also follows suit – e.g. Design Tech High School, commonly referred to as d.tech, in Redwood Shores, California, which was funded by the Oracle corporation, focuses on teaching teenagers Design Thinking.

One of the institutions who implement Design Thinking in its curriculum is Olin College of Engineering, a small, new kind of engineering college on the outskirts of Boston. The Olin program is organized into streams interacting with one another, and the design stream is one of them, spanning value creation activities all the way from “opportunity identification and problem framing through detailed design to end of life and closed-loop systems.”  Besides, students also take design courses specific to their area of study by the way, meaning they usually take 8 to 10 design courses in total, far more than a typical engineering program. Thus, students are not just challenged to apply their area of expertise to “design it right,” but also take ownership of figuring out how to “do the right thing” and add value to people’s lives in a meaningful way.

The proponents of Design Thinking believe it is the key to education’s future: it “fosters creative confidence and pushes students beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.”

The Olin academia finds the effects of the Design Thinking curriculum quite beneficial both for the students involved. Unlike conventional schools where students are “guided” through the well-structured learning process of lectures, homework and exams by an expert “professor,” Design Thinking requires students to take charge of their own learning with minimal instructions.  According to Richard K. Miller, Founding President of Olin, once the students realize that they really have the freedom to shape their learning experience and make real decisions, they usually “respond well to the new experience, even though it often actually results in significantly more work and less certainty about the technical content knowledge gained.”

The emphasis in the d.school and the like is shifted from traditional product design to the process of designing, and further to the process of designing producers, and even people — all with the aim of “social innovation.”

“We build people first, then things,” says Larry Leifer, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the university’s Center for Design Research. For Leifer, the d.school is a kind of anti-university. While traditional universities with their academic disciplines that provide “context-independent knowledge,” the world and its problems are not organized by discipline. In contrast, the d.school learning is context-dependent,” embracing an extradisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) approach and pulling whatever it needs from any discipline in order to solve specific problems.

According to Peter N. Miller, professor and dean of the Bard Graduate Center in New York, this is the essence of this education paradigm. Design Thinking “redescribes the classical aim of education as the care and tending of the soul; its focus on empathy follows directly from Rousseau’s stress on compassion as a social virtue.”

By standing outside the professional structure of the disciplines, such Design Thinking institutions remain free to ask new kinds of cross-disciplinary questions and “follow less-frequented tracks across the intellectual landscape.” As a result they can be more open to divergence and creative work, be places of real exploration and new forms of teaching and research. This, Miller believes, makes Design Thinking similar to the liberal arts, or humanities. Still, where the liberal arts are about problems, he goes on, Design Thinking is about solutions. While liberal arts take the familiar aspects of life and defamiliarize them in the interest of interpretation, Design Thinking takes the complexities of life and simplifies them in the interest of problem-solving.

As the boundaries of “design” in the 21^st century grow to be less certain, there is going to be a considerable demand for strategic design managers delivering solutions to new or complex problems, driving growth and solving issues. According to Neal Stone, visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and director of leapSTONE, there is a fork in the road fast approaching for design. “On the one side you have the traditional specialisms [product, graphic, interior etc.] that continue to involve the craft of design, on the other we see the more facilitative skills of the designer hard at work, convening and problem-solving in new ways such as service or business design. The power of the design process, though, is common to both.”

Already today, design is more and more central to the success of the modern business. Designers are no longer being brought in at the end of the process to make things look pretty, but rather are providing essential insights from the ground up in order to chart new paths and truly innovate. Businesses are realising the value of design beyond styling and aesthetics. Design is being recognised for its strategic value. This means that in the future every executive team will feature Chief Design Officer or Chief Creative Officer whose role it is to ensure that every element of the business is designed well, and designed holistically.

Asta Roseway, principal research designer at Microsoft Research, describes this role as a “fusionist,” with the designer acting as the “fusion” between art, engineering, research, and science, while seamlessly blending together their best aspect. People in this position will mix classical design skills with a “generalist” approach to technology, as well as high-level collaboration and communication skills as they work to connect all parties through design. Working across many disciplines and interest groups, the fusionist will be expected to bridge gaps between seemingly disparate products, services, and information sources. Basically, they will “use Design as the unifying vehicle to drive the best experience” much needed in the times when global challenges can only be solved by a collaboration of minds and diversity of views. This is already beginning to happen in the emerging fields of biofabrication and wearable technology.

As designers gradually change shape, the expectations on them are changing as well. How should educators change the shape of their classes accordingly?

What makes a good design education that gets students ready for the career evolution and challenges that lie ahead is its ability to give them the right transferable skills required to be problem-solvers and design thinkers.

Design students need to understand how technology is changing the world, and educators should prepare them for designing for these shifting circumstances. “A design education for the future is not one in which technology is simply a tool for the design or display of information but a data-rich, data-aware landscape that is reading and responding to everything we do,” writes the AIGA Designer 2025 team.

In order to achieve that, design programmes should teach how to design for the breadth and depth of how today’s (and the future’s) technological systems respond to context. A large part of those considerations relate to bridging physical and digital experiences together and making the journey through a product or service as seamless as possible for users.

As designers of the future are expected to be addressing design problems across varying scales, and be able to identify the relationships between people, things, and activities within complex systems, up-to-date design courses should also teach management and collaborative skills. This means educators should make sure that students are equipped with the tools and processes they need for negotiating with various stakeholder groups that will likely each bring their own differing agendas to a project.

Adaptability and ability to embrace new knowledge is one of such tools. With the current – extraordinarily rapid – pace of change in technology and business, lifetime learning needs to be at the forefront of future-proofing any design career. Continuous learning is the best investment creatives can make in themselves, for developing interchangeable skills and cross-sectional abilities will be indispensable in a design career of the future.

Ideally, design graduates of such programmes would have the ability not only to snatch up the design jobs of the future but also to work within a range of sectors and be better represented in leadership positions, for example as MPs and CEOs.

 

When facing a choice between numerous career opportunities and university courses, most prospective design students will have to reflect on how their future job might evolve by the time they enter the workplace. With technology, emerging global economies and fast-growth industries reshaping employment as we knew it, regional and world markets are changing at such a fast pace that even today we see some in-demands jobs and skills didn’t exist a decade ago. So, the question is – what will the designers of the future be expected to do? And how can design students of today futureproof their careers of their choice?

Experts estimate that the design sector is projected to increase by 20% annually over the next two to three years. Mariana Amatullo, co-founder and former vice president of the Designmatters department at Art Center College of Design, points it out that design is now more widespread than ever. “The temporalities of design are more varied, and territories of design have been altered,” she says.

In the UK alone, 900,000 new creative jobs are set to appear by the year 2030, which will bring along a vast scope for nuanced tasks and entirely new roles. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be only a 0-1% growth in traditional graphic design positions between 2014 and 2024, falling well short of the anticipated 7% growth across all sectors. In the meantime, design positions in “networked communications,” including social media, app design, and basically anything to do with the internet, are expected to increase by 27% over the same period. The advancements in technology has not only made the market more competitive, with around 45% of jobs currently in the market set to become automated in the future. They have been changing the very landscape of design, shifting its role from a largely stylistic endeavor to a field tasked with solving various technological and social problems.

According to Dave Miller, a recruiter at the design consultancy Artefact, over the next five years, design as a profession will continue to evolve into a hybrid industry that is as much technical as it is creative. “A new wave of designers formally educated in human-centered design—taught to weave together research, interaction, visual and code to solve incredibly gnarly 21st-century problems—will move into leadership positions. They will push the industry to new heights of sophistication.”

With this in mind, design practitioners and educators try to predict which careers will continue to emerge, and be in demand in the future. Now as technology permeates almost every aspect of our lives, it creates cross-disciplinary opportunities that will become the foundation for future design jobs. When asked about the most important design jobs within the next three to five years, design experts name roles that describe design thinkers with fluent digital capabilities.

Graphic designers of yesterday have evolved into UI/UX designers, an already in-demand role that is expected to witness job growth. Major brands and financial services are investing heavily into this field as they need to improve the digital experiences and loyalty of the customers who use their apps. Same is true about digital product designers required to design any technology-driven products and experiences, from designing smart gadgets and systems to apps and technological advancements.

Among the fields on the forefront of design and technology explorations are virtual and augmented realities that are set to be layered over the physical world in seamless ways. Gavin Kelly, co-founder and principal of Artefact, is sure that augmented reality designers delivering intuitive and immersive experiences will be welcome in a wide spectrum of industries, from entertainment to education and health care.

Other future design careers balancing between technology and creativity include real-time 3D designers who are expected to leave behind game design and join product teams to create entertainment and productivity tools with complex interaction problems; avatar programmers who will occupy themselves with creating celebrities’ best representation in virtual scenarios such as VR, mobile games, and movies; and sim designers who will pull together customer data, behavioral models, and statistical models to design simulated people that will help predict future customer behavior. Machine-learning designers, intelligent system designers, and cybernetic directors are also on the list.

Similarly, wearable technology has the ability to help and transform lives as it spreads across various spheres, from healthcare to wellness and fitness to aged services. Experts predict that in the nearer future it will see an influx of fashion designers and artists partnered with engineers, in order to create technologies that will go into our fibers and onto our skin.  Therefore, wearable technology designers will be sought after in the next decade, particularly as populations age.

Choosing a career of a complex 3D designers also seems to be a great investment in the future. With growing affordability of 3D printers, more and more industries are going to employ 3D printing techniques to deliver improvements in materials as well as cost efficiency. According to a research by MIT, the strength of 3D printed buildings has considerably improved to withstand stresses from adverse weather, which gives every reason to believe that construction industry will need 3D designers to further develop 3D printing technology, especially in remote areas with limited resources, like the surface of Mars.

According to Ketterman, who took the academy path himself, even if you try to participate in forums or start your own study group, these programs are mostly made up of adults switching careers who do not prioritize extra socializing with fellow students.

The bootcamp approach most design academies employ does not allow to adequately train students for real-world jobs, and the “Our 12-week course will launch your design career!” slogans appear to be nothing more than exaggerated marketing. Having those unrealistic expectations, students of the academies are often disappointed when they can’t land a job or are ill-equipped for it, having problems with managers and team members. Valuable wisdom that can be gained through a sit-up with an industry-tested mentor can’t be extracted from a video library.

“Basically, students are just buying a certificate, but it’s useless,” concludes Philips. “They’re designed for quantity over quality. No industry professional takes those types of 12-week “UX Design Certificates” seriously.” Designed purely to “productize” education, such programs attract people with low fees that will boost companies’ bottom line.

However, experts agree that if the online model is rolled to more lengthy and detailed programs, it could develop into a new primary educational paradigm.

Philips claims that brick-and-mortar design education institutions are nothing but relics of the past, “echoes of the industrial age, similar to factories, offices, retailers, and so on,” that are “going the way of the dinosaurs.” In his opinion, the best design schools of the future will combine personalized, online courses at varying depths with an awareness of local languages, customs, and cultures. As design education is moving from physical campuses to the web and becomes accessible in the far corners of the world, the curriculum needs to consider cultural differences and courses must be tailored to local customs and cultures.

Does this mean that traditional brick-and-mortar design schools will soon grow obsolete and have to go? Bowers believes that through radical actions institutions “stuck in a rut of ritualistic methodology” can establish themselves in the realm of design education of the future. He outlines several solutions meant to keep them in business. Addressing the problem of high tuition fees, he suggests adopting an accelerated program, somewhere between 48 and 72 weeks, cutting all classes that are not directly related to design theory, methodology, or application. This, he hopes, will help designer students to avoid acquiring debt on unnecessary classes, as the bulk of their training will be accomplished in one year of study instead of a traditional four-year journey.

Aiming to prepare students for challenges of real-world workplaces, Bowers proposes to emulate the journeyman model utilized by the building trades. He thinks that allowing students to work at semester-long projects creates poor time management habits. These, according to Bowers, could be replaced with new mini-projects every week addressing a specific area of design process within a larger, team-oriented effort, e.g. user research or visual design. Rotating students through clearly defined and interdependent design roles, with a professor adopting the role of a creative director rather than an instructor or “educational facilitator”, would also help students to be better trained for the job.

All experts agree about the importance of an opportunity to collaborate with experienced, senior-level professionals during years of study. For students, working with mentors in parallel with their learning is very helpful because they can critique portfolios, share stories from the field, and help make professional connections. Besides, industry people could consult and advise institutions on their design curriculum to make it more applicable to the requirements of the profession.

Real-world work and internship should also be included in the design education to provide the valuable practice of on-the-job training.  “At some point, you’ll have to move on from the safe confines of class projects and gain exposure to real-world work. Even if that means doing some pro-bono work, do it. There’s no substitute for working with real clients—taking their feedback, questions, and criticisms and using them to refine your work,” Ketterman advises.

It is obvious that design education paradigm is changing. The traditional design school must change or it will be replaced with a new approach that will more capably address resources and and professional development of aspiring designers. It is not year clear what form the coming paradigm will take but some things are certain. If aspiring designers hope to start a fruitful career, they must take the initiative for their training, try various design roles, learn soft skills to interact with peers, and seek advice from trustworthy design mentors.