Beopen+ed

Many students wonder whether art and design education is right for them. It’s understandable: Art in education is regrettably not as glorified as science courses. At the same time, many people pursue career options without taking art and design into consideration.

On the other hand, did you know that art and design education has more benefits than you can imagine? Contrary to popular beliefs, it can open many doors of opportunities for you. In this post, we’ll explain what art and design education is, and how it can benefit students, particularly adolescents.

Art and design education is a type of education designed to teach you the fundamental skills required in creative industries. It also exposes you to a variety of art disciplines such as performing arts and visual arts. This type of education is helpful for students looking to become actors, producers, advertisers, animators, and designers, among others, in the future.

How Art Benefits Adolescents. With art education, adolescents will be given time, space, and materials for creative expression, which is immensely beneficial for individual growth and development. Adolescents undergo a period of vulnerability and adjustments due to their physical, psychological, and social development. They also experience increased emotional reactivity, where they interpret positive and negative information in exaggeration. Because of this, adolescents are more prone to being part of conflicts and tend to make more risky choices and exhibit risky behavior.

With art, adolescents will be given time, space, and materials for creative expression, which is immensely beneficial for individual growth and development. Art has also been found to be impactful towards individuals’ physical and psychological well-being. Several studies found that art can lower stress, improve memory, and make people feel more socially connected.

Benefits of Art Education. The following are known benefits of art education towards adolescents:

1. Art and design education improves student engagement. Art education provides opportunities for students to demonstrate their skills, gain self-confidence and see themselves in a positive light. It also makes them gain a different perspective about learning.
2. Art in education fosters positive culture and behavior in schools. With art, adolescents can learn patience, determination, and confidence in them. Because many forms of art require artists to take small steps and keep practicing to improve, adolescents that are trained in art and design tend to have healthier habits, behaviors, and attitudes. Art also enables adolescents to have a better grasp of themselves and their identities and expressions. It also teaches students to respect the uniqueness of others. This helps foster a positive culture at school.
3. Art develops creativity. Creativity is one of the prized skills in modern-day workplaces. It allows you to solve complex problems with ease. With art and design education, students are trained to be creative and original.

Art requires adolescents to see things from multiple perspectives and to try unconventional ways when it comes to reaching goals. In a fast-changing world, creativity allows adolescents to adjust quickly and approach problems without losing their sense of identity.

4. Art enhances higher levels of thinking. Art and design education has been found to sharpen students’ critical thinking skills. Through art, adolescents learn to observe, interpret, analyze, and evaluate different concepts and ideas surrounding them. This impacts other academic subjects as well, including life outside of school.
5. Art builds in-demand skills in modern workplaces. By embracing multiple disciplines, adolescents can become valuable when they begin to pursue their career choices. Art teaches adolescents to learn language skills, interpersonal skills, and even mathematical skills.

Art is beneficial to adolescents in multiple ways. It helps them build skills that are needed in life, as well as in modern-day workplaces. In a period marked by physical, psychological, and social changes, art provides a space for adolescents to learn more about themselves and the world around them.

In a world where people are checking their smartphones 9 times an hour, competition for learner’s attention is extra fierce. According to KnowledgeGuru, recent learning trends such as mobile, gamification, game-based learning, performance support, use of learning science and interactive video are all attempts to capture learner attention and engage them on a deeper level. Among relatively new trends is microlearning which is arguably the most effective technique for today’s students.

Kirstie Greany, Senior Learning Consultant at Elucidat defines microlearning as breaking a large chunk of information into small sections which is target or specific outcome based. Microlearning is mostly associated with e-learning which delivers bite-sized specific pieces of content to an audience, when and where they need it. Microlearning content can be in the form of a presentation, activity, game, discussion, video, quiz, book chapter, or any other format from which someone learns. Typically, these self-contained information nuggets range in duration from 1 to 15 minutes and are usually focused on one or two tightly defined learning objectives, unlike conventional e-learning units that can take up to 60 minutes.

Tom Spiglanin, Ph.D. scientist turned learning strategist/designer in Aerospace University, the educational division of the Aerospace Corporation, describes microlearning as a one-objective product that needn’t navigation and doesn’t have inherently complex structure. Spiglanin points it out that microlearning units are not simply chunked learning content. As a part of a larger product, such unit of learning content may require knowledge or context provided by earlier chunks in the overall sequence, while microlearning, in contrast, stands alone and provides its own context where needed.

Holly Clark, an Education Strategist from San Diego, California, a Google Certified Innovator and National Board Certified Teacher, thinks highly of microlearning: ‘This learning is frequently fueled by curiosity and inquiry. A deep dive results in richer understanding through actual examples and rapid fire metacognitive thinking’.

Clark highlights key points why microlearning is so revolutionary. Among others, the list includes notifications that lead to rich conversations and crucial information, new connections that are organic and not forced and quick creative inspiration. However, easy access and on demand information are the benefits of microlearning that are pointed out by most of educators and learning strategists.

According to Clark, ‘easy access’ implies that learning channels are open to everyone without applying for a special programme or paying exorbitant fees for classes, while ‘on demand information’ means one can get as much information as they want when they want it and control amount of time spent consuming learning material.

Microlearning units tend to be better than larger modules for just-in-time support, Greany agrees. When one needs a refresher on particular material, it is much more convenient to watch a 2 minutes video on this particular topic rather than to wade through a 60-minute module that covers all the related information. These bite-size nuggets can also be used flexibly, being combined and consumed depending on learner’s preferences.  Learners only have to work through the topics that are meaningful to them, and access them in an order that meets their immediate needs.

Connie Malamed, the author of the Instructional Design Guru app and the book Visual Language for Designers, also sees such benefits as immediate results, effective microlearning enabling people to quickly close a small knowledge or skill gap (e.g. some universities are using a microlearning strategy to help students learn about collaborative and social technologies) and quick achievements: because people can typically process around four bits of information at a time, it’s easier for a learner to achieve success from a short learning intervention. It is also notable that e-learning pieces designed to be meaningful in a short session (10-15 minutes) lead to better performance. As work by Dr. Paul Kelley has shown, intense 20-minute bursts of study, separated by 10-minute breaks, can yield better long-term memory retention than longer, continuous periods of study.

Summing up all the benefits of microlearning, it is fair to say this approach saves time, energy and money. However, effectiveness of microlearning has been debated within the learning industry, as short pieces of content don’t necessarily equal good learning or improved performance.

Malamed draws our attention to the fact that there is insufficient research to know whether microlearning is an effective strategy for reaching long-term learning goals, for which microlearning interventions could end up as content fragments that are not tied together. There is also imminent potential for confusion as microlearning solution requires from learners an ability to switch between a wide variety of formats. Last but not least, microlearning might appear to be lacking cognitive synthesis, as educators can’t be certain that learners will synthesize content from bits of information well enough to construct appropriate mental models.

It is also crucial to analyze when the audience and content can benefit from extreme chunking, and therefore well-designed microlearning can be a good strategy. Sharon Bollen, Ed.D., professor Emerita of Art  in the Department of Art, Fine Art and Art Education and a consultant of the Mount’s Art Education program, is certain that not all training fits the microlearning mode, some skills are not meant to be acquired in 5 to 15 minutes per day. She believes that microlearning is not useful when people need to learn complex skills, processes, or behaviors, such as project management, agile software development and processes, instructional design, any software tool or teamwork skills. What is more important, she writes, education industry needs ‘better clarity on when we need to formally train people, when we need to reinforce knowledge or skills people are building on their own, and when we simply need to keep key principles or practices front and center’.

At its best, microlearning helps learners build long term memory as well as enhance knowledge they already have and provides immediate access to short, targeted lessons and support materials. In the right context and done with the overall experience in mind, microlearning can be highly effective, while at its worst, it can be another distraction to ignore.

The thing is that today when we speak about a degree as a means to build a career, we speak about university rankings and well-known university brands rather than about actual level of skills development. For example, it is often the case that graduating from Harvard does not really say anything about the student’s practical skills or ability to contribute to a real world organization. Instead, it signals the world of potential employers that they were accepted to such a reputable institution as Harvard. In short, the current paradigm puts too little emphasis on mechanisms for measuring knowledge, skills and expertise (such as work portfolios) and way too much emphasis on the brand value of higher educational institution.

This certainly counts well in favour of Coursera, EdX and the like. An increasing number of public universities started offering dramatically lower cost Master’s Degrees on MOOC platforms over the past year, which is a big step in the right direction. As thousands of universities and established companies turn to the online education platforms to offer their courses, this will continue to enhance the credibility of online learning and shift the assessment of education from an emphasis on brand name to more direct evaluations of knowledge.

All this sounds good in theory but the reality is so far not as rosy as it may seem. Although MOOC platforms show a great potential to increase diversity of courses, the reality is that they have moved away from niche courses in the liberal arts to focus on courses that get the biggest audiences, such as ones on clearly marketable skills like computer programming.

The question of low costs is also nuanced. While entry-level courses that take 4-12 hours cost close to nothing, degrees that take 2-4 years to complete cost money, starting off at 9,000 USD. Although this is less than is charged by universities for campus-based courses, it still strains the wallet and does not fully solve the problem of student debt burdens.

Last but not least, although the credibility for the certificates and degrees offered by the MOOC platforms is growing, they are still generally perceived as valuable additions to your resume, rather than a full-fledged equivalent to a college degree.

According to Levine, this poses a threat of splitting the world of higher education in “two kinds of education.” One is more likely to be full time and end in degrees – it will be likely to be more expensive and will therefore be selected by wealthy students, while the other, online model will be available much more cheaply to populations that can’t afford the first kind of education. In other words, this system will promote inequality rather than provide all students with equal opportunities.

Some experts disagree with this grim view on the new world brought in by Coursera and the like. Debora Spar, senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online, believes that “our physical campuses, like cathedrals of an earlier age, could become historical relics — cherished, yes, and still used, but no longer central to the educational mission.” She believes that although small groups will still select – and pay for – the bundled undergraduate experience (four years, on campus, with education plus everything else), the majority will switch to “an a la carte model” offered by the MOOC platforms.

“Most critically, our job is to acknowledge the inequities that mark our existing structures of higher education, and then harness the power of digital technologies to imagine something better,” Spar concludes. “Something that breaks the strangleholds of physical capacity and high fixed costs to deliver education that is affordable, accessible, and intellectually exciting.”

One of the interesting facts about higher education during the pandemic: last year, when we saw traditional enrollments in higher education decline, enrollments in non-traditional providers – such as Coursera, EdX and other massive open online courses (MOOCs) – boomed. Does that mean the learning paradigm will be changed forever? Or can traditional colleges and universities compete with companies like Coursera?

When two Stanford University professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, started Coursera in 2012, leading universities had little interest in teaching their own students via the online format. Back then, the project’s focus was on building free online courses to bring teaching from elite colleges out to the world. The target market was people who couldn’t get to a traditional campus, so the project did not have a revenue model or offer degrees.

Today, it is a major online education platform that serves students in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. It provides students around the world with thousands of free and low-cost courses, from more than 300 universities and companies. The courses from various domains, ranging from computer science to cooking are offered by the best educators from the well-known schools, such as Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duke University. Industry partners, such as Cisco, Intel, and IBM, offer working professionals certificates and specializations. Employees can also upskill with training opportunities offered through corporate partners such as Airbus, L’Oréal, and PayPal. HR experts admit that a certificate, specialization, or degree from Coursera adds value to the student’s CV, thus offering an affordable and convenient way to advance their career.

The current Coursera business model now generates revenues from subscriptions, verified certificates, and degrees. In March 2021, the company went public. What preceded that is the fact that in the spring of 2020, as colleges across the country shut down, enrollments at Coursera were four to five times higher than usual. According to the company, more than 3,000 universities across the world, resource-constrained institutions among them, had expressed interest in putting their own courses online, aiming to re-bundle their offerings in a less expensive way.

One of the key trends behind these changes is the digital revolution putting more power in the hands of learners, while control the colleges had over the market gradually slips. According to Arthur Levine, a distinguished scholar at New York University and president emeritus of Columbia University’s Teachers College, measuring learning by time in seats will gradually transition to outcome-based education. Degrees won’t necessarily be the dominant form of credential anymore as students turn to “just-in-time education” that quickly provides them with the skills for microcredentials they need for the labor market. In his book “The Great Upheaval,” co-written with Scott Van Pelt, the associate director of the communications program at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he explains that present-day students prioritize personalized education and low prices. Accustomed to getting what they need 24/7 in other spheres of life, they are not willing to acquire a whole expensive degree programme, when what they actually need is an opportunity to take things that are going to be most important to their futures, rather than a whole series of unrelated courses.

Although MOOC platforms do not create educational materials, but partner with numerous university partners and companies to offer quite an impressive catalogue of courses and degrees. “Platforms are very, very good at creating more diversity, not less,” argues Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO. “They do really good at niches, because even if there are only 1,000 people in the world who want a course on ‘the structural issues of glued plywood,’ or whatever, no one would ever want to make a course for that because it’s not big enough. But if you get to the global audience, it would be.”

Moreover, Coursera has courses from the top education content providers from around the world, including universities and companies that are reputable in the given area of knowledge – such as Google in IT. Such courses take much less time to complete than a traditional degree programme offered by a regional university or a community college that a student can alternatively afford to increase their odds of finding a decent job. What is even more important, this degree will not probably add anything to their resume. “So what would a Google certification be worth to me as a person who earned it versus a credential, a degree from my local regional university?” asks Levine. And he goes on, “Everybody’s heard of Google,” while a local communityt college might be regarded as an institution for mediocre people.

To many, social media and education may seem like unlikely bedfellows. Formal design education is mostly localized, taking place inside of institution walls. It’s an opportunity to study, learn, experiment, and grow, and to do so within a community that can provide critical feedback. By contrast, Instagram is global, instant, and addictive. It’s not exactly designed to encourage constructive responses or thoughtful discourse. When it comes to graphic design, it favors polished end products over the messiness of process and the realness of failure.

But Instagram has also proven to be an excellent platform for finding highly specific communities of like-minded people, geographic boundaries be damned. Unlike higher education, it’s available to anyone with an internet connection. And when used inside of an educational context, it can help forge connections—between people, between styles—and grant access to designers and aesthetic traditions that fall outside the often limited range of the traditional canon.

As the social media platform tailor-made for visual media, it’s no surprise that Instagram is having an undeniable effect on style and form in contemporary design. In many ways, the classroom is an ideal place to make sense of this shift. So how can education and Instagram be used together to take stock of this moment in design and further the field?

This is the overarching question we posed to three design educators from three North American institutions, who we invited to discuss this sprawling topic, starting with how and why they use Instagram in their own classrooms.

Meet the educators: Cem Eskinazi is an educator at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a type designer at Occupant Fonts. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. On Instagram he’s @cemeskinazi.

YuJune Park is a professor and associate director of BFA Communication Design at Parsons School of Design and a co-founder of Synoptic Office. She lives in New York, New York. On Instagram she’s @synopticoffice.

Dori Tunstall is the dean of the faculty of design at Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University and a design anthropologist. She lives in Toronto, Canada. On Instagram she’s @deandori_ocadu.

YuJune Park: What I think is super fascinating is how, year after year, there seems to be an increase in comfort, and I might even say preference, for connecting online rather than in person. Putting aside my own concerns about what this says about our society, I do find Instagram to be helpful in terms of building community and being able to share feedback in a way that oftentimes feels more open and honest than what my students might be willing to say in person or in class. I think Instagram is most powerful when it’s used to build community. It can become a bit of a virtual village center for my students. I have them create an Instagram account just for our class, and then use it to post daily progress on projects. It’s been extraordinarily successful in terms of having an ongoing dialogue.

Dori Tunstall: The platform has been an important tool for me in making the position of the dean more accessible. I’m @deandori_ocadu, and I post #deandrag every morning. I explain what I’m wearing and what I’m doing during the day. That’s so all of my students understand what the role of the dean is within the institution, and hopefully it helps them to navigate the system of the institution a little better. It makes them feel like they can come up to me easily because they liked my sunglasses or the scarf I was wearing.

Cem Eskinazi: At RISD, professors use Instagram to track the individual projects of students—it’s a good tool for updates. The graphic design department also has an official Instagram account, which students will take over from time to time. It gives them the opportunity for exposure, which is what a lot of students are looking for from Instagram. We also try to assign projects that ask students to make things for Instagram so that we can bring the platform into the critique, take it seriously, and ask higher-level questions.

“It can become a bit of a virtual village center for my students.”

Tunstall: I find it really fascinating the way in which students are playing with static images to give them a sense of motion and a sense of activity: animating graphics with motion, Boomerangs, Gifs…

Park: I recently read an article on the history of the poster. It was interesting to think about a certain cultural moment in time when posters in England were specifically for making pronouncements. In every historical moment there’s been a platform for self-promotion, with the goal of communicating to the widest audience possible. Today, Instagram has become that.

Tunstall: Instagram post is the new poster!

Park: Basically! Instagram is to the post just like, you know, the town square in late 1800s London was to the poster.

One thing I’ve noticed as an overall trend is that form used to be something that you experienced in a moment. When you think of the poster, it’s this static medium. But design is increasingly becoming experiential, and it asks to be a form that people can interact with. Of course, you see static images on Instagram, and they’re designed to be legible and bold at the small scale of a phone frame. But then you also see really amazing things happening with Instagram Stories, which is about form as it happens over time—and kind of this mashup of real life and graphic gestures.

Tunstall: Another tool that I find very valuable is live-streaming. A lot of times I’ll live-stream events so that the students who follow me have access to them. Or they won’t know it’s going on until they see the stream, and then they’ll show up later. It’s a feature that shifts the emphasis to community, because it works in conjunction with being in a place and engaging in an actual experience.

Park: Right. At Parsons, we have limited shared design labs, but we don’t have desk space for every student. Virtual space is the only space that can accomodate everyone together. And we’re an extraordinarily privileged school in many ways. For schools with less resources for art and design than ours, the vast majority of students have even less physical studio space. So while Instagram will never be able to build community in the way a physical space would, it does offer other opportunities for engagement with like-minded makers.

I find Instagram to be much less useful from a design education standpoint when it’s used in the way that Pinterest is used: for passive consumption. It’s like a coffee-table book with beautiful images and no essays. I find it to be more interesting when it’s used almost like a phonebook—a way to connect with other people.

Tunstall: It’s amazing to see communities of color finding their own artistic community on Instagram. You see that on Twitter, too, in the form of conversations, but on Instagram you see it really strongly in regards to visual media.

One important aspect of the work that I do is helping people recognize that there are multiple modes of excellence in different cultural aesthetic traditions. Take the African diaspora, for example. On Instagram you can easily find work that’s happening in Africa, in the Caribbean, in North America. You can see the work that’s being done by people who have traditionally been marginalized from mainstream magazines or big design competitions. So Instagram can be used to build internal community, but also to broaden access to different aesthetic traditions.

Park: It’s making the design community both more localized and more globalized. You are able to find people who share your vision for design. First, the geographical boundaries need to be broken down, but then this world can get very specific. Maybe you’re connecting with somebody 2,000 miles away and you both have a specific research interest and you’re able to build off each other. I find that to be really encouraging.

Teaching has changed so much even in the 15 years since I’ve been in school. The whole master/apprentice model has kind of gone away. There’s been this radical flattening of that hierarchy, and I think Instagram has a role in that. There’s so much more room for different voices, and I find that incredibly exciting.

“I find Instagram to be more interesting when it’s used almost like a phonebook—a way to connect with other people.”

Tunstall: I do think it’s a very powerful tool for flattening the hierarchy. We have a huge diversity of students and having access to many different influences is really, really important in terms of making them feel like they belong in design.

To an extent, we are still teaching a version of the Bauhaus, which comes from a particular place in a particular time within a particular history. We’re now beginning to dismantle and deconstruct it, but students still feel a very real pressure to be like European designers. Social media helps create a sense that there isn’t that kind of hierarchy anymore—there’s so many other ways to be inspired. There’s so many other people that you can connect with and find guidance from as you develop your own work.

Park: Right, and people say, “Oh, but Instagram is overly curated.” But since when has the history of design education not been? There’s always been the canon. Instagram at least gives the chance for everyone to be invited to the table.

Eskinazi: But there’s another side to that as well. I teach sophomores, and I can see that it’s challenging for younger students because there’s a level of performance anxiety. They have to put themselves out there to join this conversation, but it’s not always the safest space.

Tunstall: I always think of the performative aspect more as “curation,” though, and I think that can be useful, too. To some degree, Instagram is your digital portfolio in your pocket. When you’re a young designer networking with people, being able to pull out your phone and show the best of your work and talk about the process behind what you’re doing makes you more memorable to people.

Eskinazi: One of the challenges that I’m having with my students is that with the rapid mode of consumption right now—just looking at image after image after image—I feel like they are losing their criticality a bit. Platforms like Instagram are super sleek, and it doesn’t really allow for that the friction needed to ask critical questions. It privileges quantity over quality, and in that sense, it’s hard to bring the conversation back to, “What is this work really saying?” That’s been the biggest challenge for me, to pull students back from it a bit and make them understand that design is actually a process and not just the end product. Instagram really values that end product. It’s kind of like objectifying design.

Tunstall: I actually find that students mostly use Instagram to document their processes. Maybe they come with very polished images at the end, but for the majority of my students, if they’re not posting selfies, they’re posting pictures of process, and their community is responding. They’re looking for feedback: Is this a process that seems to be working? If not, why is it not working?

“Platforms like Instagram are super sleek, and it doesn’t really allow for that the friction needed to ask critical questions.”

Park: I have similar challenges as Cem with students appropriating styles that, on a gut level, they find beautiful or compelling in some way. But they aren’t really asking the deeper questions: Why do they gravitate to that style? What social, political, and cultural factors merged to create a style like that?

Form doesn’t come from nowhere. Dori mentioned the Bauhaus earlier—there’s a reason Bauhaus design looks the way it does. It came up during a post-war era when there was a search for a utility of form. When students appropriate a style without that knowledge or criticality, I find it makes them less effective visual communicators.

Eskinazi: Platforms like Instagram are shaping the way we tell stories and changing the way we construct narratives. For my generation and the generation that’s getting educated right now, the prominent style of design is very appropriation-based and reference-heavy. There’s a culture of collaging different narratives together, juxtaposing image and text, or incorporating motion. It encourages people to use more found material, and, in a sense, puts less of an emphasis on originality.

I don’t want to problematize this way of making—this collaging of narratives, or even the act of frantically consuming media. I think it’s very interesting, and I’m excited for my students to explore it. This is a generation that was born with the internet, and this is how we communicate and make things. As an educator, my point of view had been always to accept this fact and say, “Okay, this is how the world is right now, this is what the new generation of designers are given. So how can we work with what we have?” But it also requires a new heightened sense of criticality. Because we are taking and reusing things more than ever, we need to be asking where these images came from and what they mean.

“Form doesn’t come from nowhere.”

Park: Design is always going to be an expression and a reflection of how people at a certain moment in time saw the world. You see more of this collaging and appropriation of styles, and a mashup of visual styles together in one design, because that’s how we consume content now. You go online and you’re going to see 10 different styles on a page at once. You have styles from the pop-up ads on sites to the style of the site itself. We live in a mashup world—that’s how we interface with content now. Now our question is, “How do we do this type of design thoughtfully?” What I find concerning is when students do these mashups of appropriated material without asking critical questions about how these narratives are coming together, and how they influence one another. That can be dangerous.

Tunstall: But when you have a strong discourse around decolonization in the classroom—what it is, what it means, and how it relates to indigenous appropriation and misappropriation—you’re encouraging students to question what it means to engage with and use something respectfully. When it comes to use and reuse, what are the relationships of collaboration that needs to happen? What are the boundaries of homage versus appropriation? What are the conversations—and this is the emphasis that we make at OCAD—that you need to have with communities or individuals from whom you want to borrow? To engage respectfully, you have to be in direct conversation and have a dialogue, and in many ways Instagram facilitates this.

When reuse, appropriation, and misappropriation happen on social media platforms, our students engage in that critically. They would be the first ones to call out, “Hey, are you appropriating indigenous imagery? Did you get permission to do that? Have you spoken to the artists that you’re borrowing from?” They’re already aware of what’s happening on social media, so the thing that the institution is providing is the language with which to talk about it. How you engage in these discussions in the classroom ends up spilling over into how they engage in the conversations over social media.

Eskinazi: I was thinking of appropriation and reuse a bit differently. I tend to frame this under the discussion of style: When students see a typeface they like, or a particular form pop up on Instagram, they may think it looks cool and decide to use it. But this heightened sense of criticality that we’re talking about tries to go beyond just reading an image. It also goes deep into the questions of “What does a certain use of a typeface or a drop shadow say about your work? Where did you get that?” These kinds of questions are becoming more important.

Park: I agree. The conversation I tend to have on a day-to-day level with my students actually has more to do with style and its relationship to social, political, cultural, and historical moments in time. I would like to see more research and unpacking of why a form looks the way it does. In what period was it made? What factors led to it looking that way?

“Because we are taking and reusing things more than ever, we need to be asking where these images came from and what they mean.”

Tunstall: Right, but the conversation you’re talking about is exactly what we mean by “decolonization,” right? Pointing out that particular practices come from a time and a place and a history. And normally that history is rooted in colonization, in slavery. So let’s unpack that and then bring in alternative perspectives. Design is not neutral. It always comes from a time and a place and a politics that you have to engage with in order to figure out how you can best be respectful.

This roundtable interview was first published in Eye on Design Magazine, issue #05: Distraction.

The global health pandemic has shined a harsh light on the vulnerabilities and challenges humanity faces. It has provided a clear picture of existing inequalities—and a clearer picture of what steps forward we need to take, chief among them addressing the education of more than 1.5 billion students whose learning has been hampered due to school closures.

The UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education presented nine key ideas for navigating through the COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath, contending that we cannot forget core principles and known strengths as we face unprecedented disruption to economies, societies and—our particular focus here— education systems.

It is evident that we cannot return to the world as it was before. One of the strongest messages in the report is that our common humanity necessitates global solidarity. We cannot accept the levels of inequality that have been permitted to emerge on our shared planet.  It is particularly important that the world supports developing countries with investment in 21st century education infrastructures; this will require the mobilization of resources and support from developed countries, in particular with debt cancellation, restructuring, and new financing.

The magnitude of this challenge is clearly evident with regard to the digital divide in Africa. For example, only 11% of learners in sub-Saharan Africa have a household computer and only 18% have household internet, as compared to the 50% of learners globally who have computers in the home and the 57% who have access to internet. Already we see that the disruptions brought on by the pandemic are exacerbating inequalities both within and across countries. We urgently need investment and structural change so that short-term setbacks do not grow into larger, long-lasting problems.

There is a serious risk that COVID-19 will wipe out several decades of progress—most notably the progress that has been made in addressing poverty and gender equality. While the pandemic demonstrates that we belong to one interconnected humanity, social and economic arrangements mean that the impacts of the virus are disparate and unjust. Gender discrimination means that girls’ educational attainments are likely to suffer greatly, with a risk of many not returning to school post-COVID-19. This is not something we should accept; we must do everything in our power to prevent it. COVID-19 has the potential to radically reshape our world, but we must not passively sit back and observe what plays out. Now is the time for public deliberation and democratic accountability. Now is the time for intelligent collective action.

Decisions made today in the context of COVID-19 will have long-term consequences for the futures of education.  Policy-makers, educators and communities must make highstakes choices today—these decisions should be guided by shared principles and visions of desirable collective futures.   COVID-19 has revealed vulnerabilities; it has also surfaced extraordinary human resourcefulness and potential.  This is a time for pragmatism and quick action, but it is also a moment when more than ever we cannot abandon scientific evidence. Nor can we operate without principles. Choices must be based on a humanistic vision of education and development and human rights frameworks.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides many of the necessary signposts and guidelines. The International Commission on the Futures of Education—established by UNESCO in 2019 and composed of thought leaders from the worlds of academia, science, government, business and education—presents nine ideas for concrete actions today that will advance education tomorrow.

1. Commit to strengthen education as a common good. Education is a bulwark against inequalities. In education as in health, we are safe when everybody is safe; we flourish when everybody flourishes.
2. Expand the definition of the right to education so that it addresses the importance of connectivity and access to knowledge and information.  The Commission calls for a global public discussion—that includes, among others, learners of all ages—on ways the right to education needs to be expanded.
3. Value the teaching profession and teacher collaboration. There has been remarkable innovation in the responses of educators to the COVID-19 crisis, with those systems most engaged with families and communities showing the most resilience.  We must encourage conditions that give frontline educators autonomy and flexibility to act collaboratively.
4. Promote student, youth and children’s participation and rights. Intergenerational justice and democratic principles should compel us to prioritize the participation of students and young people broadly in the co-construction of desirable change.
5. Protect the social spaces provided by schools as we transform education.  The school as a physical space is indispensable.  Traditional classroom organization must give way to a variety of ways of ‘doing school’ but the school as a separate space-time of collective living, specific and different from other spaces of learning must be preserved.
6. Make free and open source technologies available to teachers and students. Open educational resources and open access digital tools must be supported.  Education cannot thrive with ready-made content built outside of the pedagogical space and outside of human relationships between teachers and students.  Nor can education be dependent on digital platforms controlled by private companies.
7. Ensure scientific literacy within the curriculum. This is the right time for deep reflection on curriculum, particularly as we struggle against the denial of scientific knowledge and actively fight misinformation.
8. Protect domestic and international financing of public education. The pandemic has the power to undermine several decades of advances.  National governments, international organizations, and all education and development partners must recognize the need to strengthen public health and social services but simultaneously mobilize around the protection of public education and its financing. 9. Advance global solidarity to end current levels of inequality.

COVID-19 has shown us the extent to which our societies exploit power imbalances and our global system exploits inequalities.  The Commission calls for renewed commitments to international cooperation and multilateralism, together with a revitalized global solidarity that has empathy and an appreciation of our common humanity at its core. COVID-19 presents us with a real challenge and a real responsibility. These ideas invite debate, engagement and action by governments, international organizations, civil society, educational professionals, as well as learners and stakeholders at all levels.

How best to adapt to today’s post-Golden Age realities, according to professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin Steven Mintz.

Seven years ago, Clay Shirky, who is now NYU’s vice provost of educational technologies, wrote a provocative and prescient blog post, which argued that higher education’s biggest challenges — especially its increasing reliance on non-tenure-track instructors — arose from the attempt “to preserve a set of practices that have outlived the economics that made them possible.”

Entitled “The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age,” Shirky wrote that colleges and universities clung to assumptions and expectations that arose during the period of rapid growth that stretched from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, when “the number of undergraduates increased five-fold, and graduate students nine-fold” and when states more than doubled their higher education appropriations and federal research grants quadrupled.

Several “Golden Age” assumptions, now sadly outdated, persist:

That demand for higher education is virtually inexhaustible, and, as a result, institutions can take enrollment growth for granted.

That full-time, first-time-in-college residential students represent an ideal that colleges and universities should prioritize in admissions.

That most students want and need an educational experience that is basically the same as that offered three-quarters of a century ago.

That rising costs can be addressed through tinkering, including modest increases in tuition and fees, government aid, and a limited reliance on adjunct instructors.

That there was no inherent conflict between tenured faculty’s teaching and research responsibilities; that teaching loads and mentoring responsibilities can fall and research expectations can rise without posing any particular problems for their institutions.

Each of these assumptions has proven profoundly misleading.

Enrollment declines have persisted for a decade. This decline poses particular challenges for small and regional institutions in the Northeast and Midwest.

Nontraditional students are as important to institutional and societal success as traditional students. Students who commute, work full-time, caregive or who have transferred represent a majority of those pursuing degrees and have different needs than those who traditional students who defined higher education’s Golden Age.

Student needs have shifted and intensified. Institutions have been forced to devote significantly more resources to financial aid and the support services that nontraditional and post-traditional students needed to succeed.

Two- and four-year institutions have found it difficult to effectively serve the growth sectors. Traditional degree and training programs have had very mixed success in serving students from low-income backgrounds, community college transfer students and working adults’ needs for retooling, upskilling and skills training.

Higher education’s cost challenges cannot be met through tinkering. To cut costs, institutions have relied increasingly on non-tenure-track faculty, and underresourced institutions have eliminated or consolidated programs. To increase revenue, colleges and universities have had to become much more entrepreneurial, admitting more international students (and, at public institutions, more out-of-state students), establishing online professional master’s programs, and treating ancillaries as revenue generators.

A caste system has emerged, in which the interests of tenured faculty and nontenured instructors and professional staff have diverged. To reduce the teaching loads of tenured faculty and free them of responsibility for advising and teaching introductory, language and composition courses, while keeping instructional costs stable, institutions increasingly relied upon lower-paid non-tenure-track instructors: graduate students, adjuncts, lecturers and postdocs and an expanding number of nonteaching professionals (including professional advisers, disability specialists, instructional designers and educational technologists, psychological counselors, and staff to run teaching, math, science and writing centers).

What made Shirky’s blog post especially controversial was his claim that higher education’s major beneficiaries are tenured faculty and senior administrators, whose salaries rose even during the Great Recession and whose perks now come largely at the expense of adjunct faculty and other contingent staff members.

The argument that tenure screens out more than it protects by creating a sharp divide between insiders and those outside the charmed circle is now increasingly voiced on the left as well as the right.

As a friend put in response to a recent forum on the future of tenure, “It’s like castles in the late Middle Ages — cannons just mean you build thicker and thicker walls to protect fewer and fewer people.”

As Shirky’s blog entry made devastatingly clear, addressing salary inequities between the tenured and nontenured teaching staff cannot be met simply by trimming administrative bloat or eliminating waste.

At his institution, cutting administrative salaries by 25 percent would save about $5 million (in 2014 dollars), but raising adjunct salaries would cost $250 million, about 17 percent of NYU’s academic budget at the time.

Reducing inequalities within individual institutions and across higher education more generally will require far-reaching shifts in mind-set and priorities. Otherwise, we are just perpetuating “an arrangement that works well for elites — tenured professors, rich students, endowed institutions — but increasingly badly for everyone else.”

So how, then, can higher education adapt to students’ changing needs and new demographic, economic and cultural realities?

Solutions aren’t easy. Unionization can, to a certain extent, address some inequities in salaries and working conditions but can also result in unanticipated outcomes. At CUNY, for example, a contract that significantly increased the pay of part-time adjuncts had the effect of reducing their numbers while increasing reliance upon untenured lecturers with full-time appointments, who were cheaper on a per-class basis.

Other pressures are brewing. We’re witnessing:

A push by state legislatures to cut college costs and expedite time to degree by encouraging completion of gen ed classes during high school as a way to cut college costs, making the community college transfer process more seamless and requiring four-year schools to enroll more transfer students or allow two-year institutions to award applied bachelor’s degrees.

Growing demands that deep-pocketed private institutions increase their enrollment, either modestly or radically.

The emergence of cheaper, faster paths to employment, including short-term, noncredit and corporate-sponsored certificate training programs.

What should colleges and universities do to adjust to our post-Golden Age realities? Some strategies are obvious:

Hope that the Biden administration will provide the funding necessary to sustain and strengthen the current model through a combination of debt relief, expanded federal financial support and encouragement of the enrollment of international students.

Make greater use of personalized, adaptive courseware, autograding and peer evaluation to allow faculty to scale gateway courses and of degree maps, degree progress monitoring tools and data analytics to track student progress, prompt timely interventions and supplement person-to-person advising.

Increase online course sharing to ensure access to specialized or difficult-to-staff programs.

Expand offerings of career-aligned certificates and certifications, which can be embedded into career paths or pursued separately.

There is, however, an alternative that I think is worthy of attention: change the game.

Perhaps you remember the conclusion to the 1983 American Cold War science fiction techno-thriller WarGames: “The only way to win is not to play.”

Sometimes, the way to win is to change the game.

As a thought experiment, let’s think of how we might change the game to better serve students with very different needs, levels of preparation, circumstances and aspirations. We might:

Expand enrollment at the more selective institutions. Not by expanding facilities, but by rethinking the academic calendar, having juniors and seniors live off campus, and adopting a HyFlex model for the delivery of the most popular classes — while hiring more faculty to maintain quality.

Create an educational journey less centered on traditional lectures, courses and seminars. There are alternate ways to deliver those classes’ content, for example, by using courseware supplemented by online lectures and various forms of support, or through novel kinds of blended experiences that involve less time in formal classrooms.

Make experiential and project-based learning much bigger parts of the undergraduate experience. Downplaying traditional classes might free students to devote more time to other educationally impactful experiences: taking part in internships (some of which should be on campus in various institutional offices); working on supervised research projects, either alone or in groups; participating in field-based and service learning activities; or contributing as team members to a faculty project.

Ensure that every student is part of a learning community, not just in their first semester or first year, but at a number of points in their education. These communities might offer a space where students can undertake projects, make presentations based on their findings or creative endeavors, and critically reflect on their learning.

Fund public institutions in ways that take account of their students’ needs. Let’s alter the current model in which there is an inverse relationship between students’ learning needs and the level of public support.

The biggest challenge facing higher education is our willingness to rethink entrenched practices and legacy assumptions.

When I arrived at Oberlin College in the fall of 1970, the new president made a modest proposal: to eliminate almost all requirements and make students responsible for designing their educational journey. His goal: to produce more self-directed graduates.

Times have changed, and higher education needs to adapt to new realities: to the diversity of our students and to the financial and equity challenges faced by most colleges and universities. The solution, I am convinced, lies in our willingness to think outside the boxes that narrow our sense of possibilities.

 

With the COVID-19 speeding up the shift of higher education online, it might seem that the golden era of online education has finally come. However, while some educators sing praise of Zoom lectures and are going to keep this tool in their teaching kit even when the crisis is over, others ring the alarm creating awareness of Zoom fatigue. So, what about Zoom? Is it a blessing or a curse?

The major shift higher education is going through can be called seismic changes only partially. It is true that the situation was greatly influenced by the novel coronavirus pandemic. But it is also cannot be denied that the recent move online is a direct result of a long-delayed response to demographic and economic shifts and of the technological change, which has been underway since around 2010, when universities and private entrepreneurs first began to experiment with Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.

Back then, these early MOOCs could hardly compete with the mainstream providers of traditional, campus-based higher education and were mainly viewed upon as a complementary tool for those who cannot afford going to college for financial or social reasons. Even today, the many discussions around the topic demonstrate that online learning, which has morphed from the earliest MOOCs and has been forced upon the most conservative universities and colleges by the pandemic, is still in the middle of its own evolution.

Most Zoom sessions offered to the students in 2020 looked more like a hasty adaptation in the times of a crisis. Everyone and his brother has discussed the limitations of using Zoom, which was not originally developed as a pedagogical tool.

Not all classroom formats translate easily onto Zoom. It works well for small-scale seminars and critiques, which do not lose intimacy and close contact of campus-based classes even online. Bringing in guest speakers works remarkably well, allowing faculty to introduce a wide range of voices into their classroom conversations. On the screen, everyone can see and hear and participate.

However, videoconferencing could hardly be the answer when it comes to classes requiring practical instructions and other hands-on teaching methods, which are often the key for fine arts and design education.

Zoom lectures are not so unambivalent either. They might work, if the instructor is compelling. Still, it is no secret that the fastest way to lose the attention of students on Zoom is to talk at them. It is even more complicated for learners to follow the lecturer when they find themselves gazing into a sea of black boxes, while all kinds of distractions are close at hand in their “home office.” “Students’ faces slip from one screen to the next as new people join in. They disappear into a tiny side panel once anything is shared. Unmuting becomes a weary standard of the class period (“can you hear me now?”) And everything in everyone’s background–the dogs, the posters, the siblings, the furniture–melds into a visual cacophony. On Zoom, the peripheral truly takes over,” Debora Spar, senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online, explains.

Class conversations on Zoom also seem to be very different from those held in a classroom of brick and mortar. Inevitably, a few students will dominate the conversation leaving quitter ones and those experiencing problems with their internet connection excluded and shut out. This requires teachers to be very directive on Zoom, asking some students to speak and diplomatically cutting off others to bring taciturn ones into the discussion.

Participating in a synchronous online class taxes powers of both the student and the instructor. Though the reasons why online meeting tools are more exhausting are not fully understood, this effect likely has something to do with how our brains process screen as compared to physical presence.

When asked to describe their online learning routine, students talk about spending most of their day in front of the screen. With classes and homework running entirely online, some claim they click their camera on as soon as they roll out of bed, others complain that screen time feels like a 24/7 commitment. Even when they are not actively on a Zoom call, Canvas discussion boards and Google Docs absorb all their studying time. This pattern induces what many call “Zoom fatigue” — exhaustion from blue light and remote interactions, which is strongly related to our brain’s inability to differentiate Zoom meetings from everything else we do onscreen, drawing down the same reserve of focus. This also brings to the lack of any physical mobility between classes.

Synchronous Zoom sessions is even more exhausting for international students, who are faced with a time difference from their classmates and professions. E.g. for learners in China studying in US universities and colleges classes could start at 11 pm and run till 2:30 am.

Besides, growing popularity of Zoom sessions reveal socio-economic differences that are harder to notice on physical campuses. This teaching method places low-income students at a disadvantage. The underprivileged group cannot afford the cost of an Internet upgrade and therefore can experience connectivity issues, which might cause video or audio interference and impair their ability to participate in discussions on Zoom.

Dr. Joshua Kim, Director of Online Programs and Strategy at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), is convinced that when it comes to Zoom and teaching, less is more. He suggests following a three-to-one strategy, holding one hour of Zoom for every three hours of class and making that time more conversation-based. Instead of taking three Zoom meeting a week, he recommends using those time blocks to hold three separate Zoom sessions and letting students signing up for just one discussion per week – to reduce the overall time students spend on Zoom.

Lucy Biederman, assistant professor of creative writing at Heidelberg University, believes that the role of Zoom in online college teaching is overestimated. In her opinion, when faced with closing campus in March 2020, most of the instructors turned to Zoom as an alternative to teaching in a physical classroom and remain dependent on this software without taking a broader picture. Biederman points out that videoconferencing software wasn’t an essential part of higher education before the pandemic, and warns against using this technology solely for technology’s sake.

Derek Bruff, director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, also believes that learning objectives should guide how college instructors use technology, not the other way around. He has coined the term “intentional tech,” meaning “knowing what kinds of learning experiences you’re interested in creating for your students, then finding technologies that help support those experiences.”

This means that educators can support their student in ways other than Zoom, choosing best-suited technologies depending on the course goals. Besides Zoom, synchronous and asynchronous options include other technologies, such as Slack, Canvas, Google chats and Google Docs, as well as own open courseware and open-source platforms.

What is indubitable is that we are now at the beginning of a new stage, which will develop into a very different model of higher education in the nearer future. The tools of online learning, with Zoom sessions playing the lead role, are undeniably powerful, even at this point. As we use them to help traditional teaching deal with the current crisis, we need to focus not on how we return to the old normal, but rather what a new normal should be.

The coronavirus pandemic brought unexpected and significant disruption to the many spheres of our lives. The last year and a half have seen empty campuses and a precipitant shift towards e-learning among other efforts of the higher educational sector to survive in these turbulent times. While some experts predict a mass extinction of colleges and universities as we know them following the crisis, it is not all that doom and gloom. Sure enough, it would be naïve to expect higher education to return to pre-pandemic normal, but certain positive changes are here to stay.

The main positive shift is likely to be around online teaching. Although some universities struggled to deliver quality online classes, this new approach to learning will most probably be a permanent solution. Recent surveys show that although most students desire a return to in-person learning, the majority also want to continue having the option to take classes online. Driven by student demand, most higher educational institutions are planning to offer various options for fully online and hybrid learning  that will combine the flexibility of online lectures with more interactive activities in-person, such as labs, seminars, workshops and Q&A sessions.

The colleges are aware of the skepticism expressed by some of the students who are concerned about whether online teaching means they are getting worse value for money. Addressing the issue, Prof Allison Littlejohn, an academic at UCL specialising in learning technology, explains that “the time needed to prepare and produce online teaching materials is much higher than for on-campus lectures.”

Instead, most universities are shifting lectures online and even go that far as talking about ending face-to-face lectures altogether. What it actually means is not foregoing any in-person classes for the students but rather replacing large lectures of 200 students upwards with online sessions that proved to be far more effective during the pandemic.

One of the main positive lessons that can be drawn from the crisis has to do with prioritizing building the virtual infrastructure over long-standing emphasis on building the physical infrastructure of college campuses. According to The World Economic Forum,“before the pandemic, the online learning environment existed predominantly as a virtual filing cabinet… The pandemic has illuminated what can be done with this online space: it can be engaging, enriching and accessible”.

44% of student respondents to a recent QS survey reveal they are open to the idea of attaining their degree via online means, which is a larger number than ever before. This brings most universities to think about including more online degree and non-degree programs into their offer as well as develop related virtual student services.

For example, it will most likely become a norm to keep lectures video recorded and available online at any time for the students to review, even for in-person classes. This is what 79% of college students wished to see continue, when asked what new services and approaches they would like to maintain once the pandemic is over.

So, what else can help universities to reimagine their offerings and move to a new higher education paradigm that can equip students with skills required for the 21st century employment market? The authors of the research article, Forever Changed! Innovation and the Future Post-Covid Higher Education Landscape, Professor Jerry Yoram Wind and CEO of QS, Nunzio Quacquarelli, suggest a major transformation of current pedagogical approaches. According to them, embracing technology as part of the teaching process will allow for much sought-after personalization and flexibility, as well as bring in numerous innovative ways to enhance learning, such as augmented or virtual reality for experiential learning and gamification to serve the new generation of Zoomers.

Ever-growing use of e-learning has another positive impact on higher education. If in the past, universities and colleges paid more lip services to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) metrics, today online learning has made education accessible to those who are not able to attend traditional learning programs. For example, there is strong evidence that non-white students greatly prefer online education models as well as virtual internships and jobs over white students. Higher educational institutions will need to make real commitments to DEI because many constituents will begin holding them accountable to their progress.

According to Forbes, the formal education system will experience fundamental change. To serve a growing market of value-oriented prospective students, traditional schools will be forced to launch lower-cost online degrees, which will result in a new kind of price war in higher education.

Relatedly, experts believe that elite colleges and universities, which are often unwilling to grow enrollments, admit more unprivileged applicants and minorities, and are slow to introduce innovative and non-traditional teaching methods in an attempt to keep their authenticity, will no longer be role models in the higher education sector. Instead, the field will see the rise of “public flagships and up-and-comer privates that innovate on many dimensions, find ways to freeze or lower costs, and dedicate themselves to being student- and employer-centric.”

Speaking of employers, they too are expected to offer an alternative to residential 4-year degrees, thus weakening the market of traditional higher education. On the one hand, following the example of Google who started treating their tech certificates as equivalent to degrees in the hiring process, many companies now offer their own non-degree education and non-traditional degrees. On the other hand, employers will continue to invest in education-as-a-benefit programs where they provide financial support to employees seeking degrees.

The future will tell what of the predictions will prove to be true.

Criticizing design education has become a popular trend these days. It is often accused of being costly and irrelevant and its value and validity are called in question. Some of the accusations are not baseless. The whole design field is going through major transformations, and educational institutions appear not to pull their weight. Still, as the industry works through its growing pains, the importance of design education seems to be greater than ever.

With tuition costs constantly rising, young people who wish to pursue a career in design – i.e. a broad range of disciplines loosely related to graphic, communication, and UX design – more often than not think of skipping school and foregoing a traditional bachelor’s degree program in favor of a crash online course or the classic school of life. Their reasoning is understandable. Unlike a med school or a degree programme in STEM with their linear course of learning where students are taught facts and procedures in preparation for passing a series of exams, the path of a design student is much more complex. Every school has its own approach, and it makes impossible to quantify the ROI of the design degree costs and estimate the actual job preparedness of a recent design graduate.

But what if we change a perspective and reflect on design universities as spaces where future designers can thrive on the luxury of learning, cultivating innovation and ambition? To determine if tuition costs are appropriate, it is essential to consider what a student gains from the experience – and in case with the design school it is not solely about skills and knowledge, it is about an access to an environment that is not easily found elsewhere.

According to Abbott Miller, partner of Pentagram, “What you’re buying in design education is not an imprimatur to get a job. It is a face-to-face, collaborative experience in a real physical space.”

Of course, design school is not the only place to get professional mentorship, but it is really the most obvious way. Operating designers set client briefs for students in traditional universities, design gurus visit as guest lecturers and even teach as professors. This generous resource could be not available elsewhere for a new designer in the industry. On the contrary, agencies often do not allow young designers to present their work and have poor internal communications in general.

Teamwork during the years of study is also crucial. The shared experiences and growth while studying can build long-lasting relationships among peers and bring fruit in the future.

Within this context, the importance of design education is in providing a framework for practicing soft skills, such as adaptability, ability to work in a team, social intelligence, and good communication, which according to the recent Forbes survey involving hundreds of companies, rank the highest among top qualities that companies are looking for in future hires. All these traits can be learned through design education with its system of design critiques, student presentations, and team projects, which occur in safe environment and with respect for young designers’ delicate egos.

Design schools also allows students unconstrained freedom of experimentation across all levels. First, it provides access to numerous resources that can be quite costly without a student pass, such as letterpress facilities, computer programs, and photography studios, which are generally free for students. Secondly, while the majority of designers will begin a career restricted to client deadlines and production requirements, design school is a safe space where creativity is not hindered by budgets and clients’ whims. This immunity to real-world restrictions sets a foundation to the mindset of the future designer who is expected to generate innovation and impact in their work.

Speaking of the job market, the mindset in future-facing companies is shifting. The role of the designer is no longer a supporting role — it is one that leads. In this respect, formal design education involves preparing students to become great problem solvers, ready to deal with today’s large, complex problems.

From this prospective, to shape the curriculum as a standardized application-oriented, ready-for-the-job set of tools and skills would be a limiting strategy. Many popular professions of today were completely unheard of 10 years ago. Following this trend, today’s computer programs will soon be outdated and familiar design processes will be reimagined, so it is natural that businesses want to prepare. Within the context of such an uncertain future, it is vital that the new generation of designers is equipped with skills that can empower them to manage complex and unfamiliar conditions with ease and confidence.

And here is where formal design education steps in. Traditional educational institutions aim to teach students to think critically, be observant and resourceful. When it comes to real-world skills, a design school isn’t out of date, it is timeless, for its key value is that of learning how to learn. It is only challenging the status quo that can lead the industry into the future.

Sure enough, there is a lot of things that can be improved and amplified in traditional design schools to make students better prepared for the real world of design careers. However, in this era of seismic shifts in the design industry, formal design education seems to be more important than ever. It teaches future designers a mindset and attitude towards life itself and empowers them to reach their full potential in creativity, self-efficacy, and collaboration. One should be ready to disrupt the routine to be able to change the world. Perhaps design education is the answer.