As the boundaries of “design” in the 21st 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.