Beopen+ed

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.

Traditional design education, as we know it, has remained consistent for centuries. Taking roots from an ages-old master-and-apprentice arrangement, it has seen a change in educational environments but not its essence: an experienced instructor challenges students with exercises that unveil the basics of the chosen discipline. Today, speaking of the traditional model we refer to a four-year university path that leads to a bachelor’s degree. However, this format is more often than not being criticized by both students and experts for forcing future designers to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars only to obtain a certificate of authenticity before entering a highly competitive industry, undertrained for the job. So, the question arises – if there any viable alternative to the conventional learning model, a brand new educational paradigm that will define the future of design education? Practicing designers share their opinions.

There’s been a heated debate recently about whether or not design education is essential for a successful career in design. Surprisingly, unlike medicine or law, design appears to be a tougher path, with yearly tuition higher than what a designer can make two years after graduation. For students as paying customers to be sure the financial investment they are making is worth it, traditional design schools need, first of all, to assess the value they provide for the price.

However, famed designer Gadi Amit laments that designer-grads are underprepared as they stumble upon the market and the impressive academic credentials of most students don’t add up to the basic skills that are required in an entry-level designer. According to his own research, students that apply for a job in his agency have portfolios broken into two categories: skills work (3D CAD) and process work (research, model-making), while only a few can boast projects showcasing the applicant’s ability to integrate seamlessly all levels of creativity.

“Academic design programs are crippled by blurry standards which are so vastly different from program to program that it is nearly impossible for me, as an employer, to have a reliable idea of what skills a student toting a design degree can be expected to possess,” Amit explains. “Some of the design schools… have no real design process education, while others have only process education.” In this way, design schools are failing their students.

Amit believes that these “one-way schools” can change the situation only by adopting a clear, “consumer friendly” approach that spells out to future designers what they are to expect from their degree – for example, if the degree is best suited for working in an in-house design team in a large corporation, but not for design-agency work, or vice versa.

Similarly, Micah Bowers, illustrator, brand designer, and Lead Editor of Toptal Design Blog, airs an opinion that even before students step foot on campus, they need to be aware of the post-graduation setting they’ll be best equipped to handle – be it a high-tempo agency, an in-house design department, or a remote freelancing setup.

Another challenge designer graduates are unprepared for is the fact that at an early stage of their career they have to spend most of their working time on routine tasks like setting type, aligning pixels, and organizing file libraries (and meeting deadlines!) rather than high-level conceptual initiatives of important design projects. Seeking to be students-centered, design schools provide ample space for students to explore areas of interest and experiment with avant garde ideas – which is great – but sadly do not ready new designers to deliver high-quality results when deadlines are approaching. Nor do they train soft skills (communication, presentation, interpersonal, etc.) and teamwork experience enabling collaboration within multidisciplinary teams — a must for all designers whether at a small agency or a large corporation. Instead, today’s education system is skewed toward teaching only professional skills.

“Even good design can be poorly received if the client doesn’t understand what’s being presented,” explains Shane Ketterman, a UX designer and a thought leader on digital marketing and branding. “Students think, “I did good work, so everyone should love it.” We all know that’s not how it works.”

This is echoed by Miklos Philips, a digital product designer: “Designers don’t work in isolation, they collaborate. If student designers don’t learn to work within a team setting, they’re bound to struggle—especially at large companies. Junior designers have to know how to function effectively in a multidisciplinary environment. If they can’t, they won’t provide value.”

As the four-year path on a physical campus continues to make less and less sense and the relevance of a design diploma is disappearing, a new educational paradigm emerges to replace the traditional design school model. As student debt rises and freelancing becomes a more accepted career choice, more people follow the route of alternative education – turning to a growing number of online academies” that promise to prepare students for design jobs in 10-12 week time and at a fraction of the cost of a four-year degree.

Online learning offers a less costly and more flexible route, students who struggle to come up with funds for a traditional education can make small payments and spend less overall. Remote learning in these “academies” also lets those students who have jobs or families keep a flexible work schedule, study from anywhere and at their own pace.

However, the effectiveness of these academic alternatives is called into question. One of the things that such quick turnaround courses and online academies lack is meaningful, personal interactions with mentors and peers. This important part of design education is replaced here with email exchanges and message boards. This might be a real disadvantage, especially for those who need in-person validation.

Ken Robinson, an international consultant on education and professor emeritus at the University of Warwick, presents his take on the distinction between learning, education and school in his piece “Standardisation broke education. Here’s how we can fix our schools” published by the Wired earlier this year. “The movement towards personalisation is already advancing in medicine. We must move quickly in that direction in education, too”, says the author.

“We are all born with fathomless capacities, but what we make of them has everything to do with education. One role of education is to help people develop their natural talents and abilities; the other is to help them make their way in the world around them. Too often, education falls short on both counts. As we face an increasingly febrile future, it’s vital to do better. For that to happen, education has to be urgently transformed. We have the resources and the expertise, but now we need the vision and commitment.

In my book, You, Your Child and School, I make a distinction between learning, education and school. Learning is acquiring new skills and understanding; education is an organised system of learning; a school is a community of learners. All children love to learn, but many have a hard time with education and some have big problems with school.

Usually, the problem is not the learners – it’s the inherent bias of education and the enforced culture of schools. For generations, formal education has been systematically biased towards narrow forms of academic ability. The result is that it largely disregards the marvellous diversity of human talents and interests.

For the past generation especially, politicians have been smothering schools in a depressing culture of standardisation. As a result, they have been marginalising the very capabilities our children need to create a more equitable and sustainable world – by which I mean creativity, compassion citizenship and collaboration.

As far as we know, human beings are the most creative creatures ever to walk the Earth. We are endowed with deep powers of imagination and the physical capacities to realise our imaginings in complex languages, theories and beliefs, as well as in the tangible forms of technology, architecture, agriculture, the arts and the sciences and so on.

The trouble is that, in the past 300 years, we have created civilisations that have dislocated our relationships with the natural environment and that now imperil our survival as a species. We face existential challenges. We have immense capabilities to innovate, but the clock is ticking and education is the only key to unlocking these capacities – not the torpid system of testing we have now, but forms of education that celebrate and cultivate these unique powers deliberately.

Our cultures and societies are deeply interwoven. And yet, throughout the world, humanity is plagued by enmities and lethal factionalism. Education is not the cause of these problems, nor is it a panacea for them. But it must be part of the solution. To be so, schools must teach and practice the benefits of citizenship, cultural literacy and compassion. The arts and the humanities have special significance here.

And our children must learn that the human adventure can only be carried forward through complex forms of collaboration. Several years ago, I moderated an event with the Dalai Lama. At one point he was asked a question. He paused for a long time and then said, “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that. What do you think?”

One of the world’s great teachers was perfectly happy to say, “I don’t know.” He knew that no one grasps more than a few tiny threads of the dense fabric of human knowledge. As the great cultural theorist Clifford Geertz put it, as human beings we are suspended in webs of significance that we ourselves have woven. We depend on other people’s knowledge for our survival in every way. But our education system is not based on collaboration – it’s based on competition.

The proliferating reach of digital technologies is the best recent evidence of our capacities for collaboration. Digital technologies could be the most far-reaching and consequential change in human history – a potential step change in our evolution as a species. Digital technologies are also changing the context in which we educate people, and what we’re educating them for. They can help us support teaching and make education more vibrant and more collaborative. Wikipedia is the largest compilation of human knowledge ever attempted, and it’s entirely collaborative and self-correcting.

The tools that we have now are astounding, and we’re still at a very early stage in their development. As artificial intelligence evolves and its impact grows, we’ll have to ask ourselves what it is that makes us distinctly human. What are the qualities we should be celebrating?

We have an opportunity now to rethink the whole ecosystem of education. We need to reinvent schools. There’s a growing movement in alternative education.

It’s about building schools that value the social dimension of learning and practical work; that place equal value on arts and sciences. They are dedicated to fostering the right conditions for people to learn; to making education more organic and less formulaic. They recognise that schools must foster young peoples’ natural appetites for learning; that schools themselves must be creative, compassionate, democratic and collaborative. And they must be more personalised and organic.

For decades, formal education has been focused on comparatively narrow forms of academic ability, which results in disregarding the diversity of human talents and interests. Modern educators see a solution in personalization, a teaching and learning process that addresses the strengths and needs of individual learners.

Sir Ken Robinson, the Professor Emeritus and education and creativity expert, remarks that the movement towards personalization is already advancing in medicine and education must move in that direction too. ‘We need to stir the motivation, vision, optimism and political commitment. That too is a task for education,’ he is convinced.

The Mark Zuckerberg backed educational foundation CZI has recently committed to the goal of “bringing personalized learning to every child,” and the Bush Foundation is funding schools designed to enable “mass customization” of instruction.

Personalization includes a balanced approach to progress monitoring of student progress that uses authentic assessments rather than single data points like standardized tests and ensures that every learner’s academic, emotional, and physical needs are understood and accommodated.

Aspects of personalized learning are already being implemented in schools around the world. Just to name a few, in some schools students are allowed to proceed at their own pace setting long-term goals in which time is not the driving factor. Personalized classrooms feature flexible seating arrangement that allows teachers to create learner-centered environment which provides for high levels of interaction. Among technologies educators use, there are learners profiles that let teachers to know students better by collecting data that communicates how, when, and what students can or want to learn. Modern digital textbooks feature attractive animations, integrated videos, check-your-understanding questions, pre-highlighting of key concepts, and analytics on learner usage. Some digital textbooks even customize questions to assess student performance and correspondingly adapt instruction.

Still, there are a number of educators who point out that the process of implementing personalized learning is not that trouble-free. Andrew Miller, the director of personalized learning at Singapore American School, expresses an opinion that personalized learning runs the risk of becoming a buzzword and of being both oversimplified and mischaracterized. In his similarly named article he explores myths of personalized learning.

It is obvious culture and creativity have always been powered by technology. Ken Robinson highlights that ‘digital technologies are <…> changing the context in which we educate people, and what we’re educating them for. They can help us support teaching and make education more vibrant and more collaborative.’ Unfortunately, this point is often simplified to equating personalized learning with computer- or technology-based instruction, which is by all means incorrect.

‘Many people believe that personalized learning mostly involves students using iPads and technology such as games and software to work at their own pace,’ Miller admits. ‘They may think students only watch videos from playlists or play games. And some researchers wrongly claim that personalized learning isn’t effective because of issues with technology.’

Jay Lynch, Senior Academic Research Consultant for Course Design, Development, and Academic Research (CDDAR) at Pearson, points out that there are other reasons why edtech as a means of personalization misses the point: the main one is that the wrong things are being personalized. By ‘wrong things’ he first of all implies instructional content, insisting that the learning experience has changed very little as far as instruction is concerned, notwithstanding the new implementations in modern educational technologies.

He believes that the instructional approach at the core of virtually all available learning products, be it a fancy massive open online course, or a technologically sophisticated personalized classroom, or an adaptive learning software,  is ‘largely inadequate for engendering the type of deep, transferable, and complex learning we want to impart to students. It simply doesn’t support the acquisition of the integrated set of cognitive strategies, affective dispositions, and foundational skills necessary to be a successful and flexible problem-solver, self-direct learner, and critical thinker’.

‘Current instructional content is highly balkanized and modularized, divided into small disconnected learning components and ‘objects’ that deny learners the opportunity to grasp the interconnected, meaningful, and holistic knowledge underlying complex learning.’

Current approach is good for memorizing isolated facts, while the key point, as suggested back in 2007 by M. David Merrill, Professor Emeritus at Utah State University, is that the foundation of instruction should be a collection of rich learning tasks that reflect the activities students are supposed to carry out post-instruction. Instruction should be problem-centered, combining real-life problems with supporting direct instruction.

‘We’re so focused on ensuring students can successfully recall every component needed to construct a house,’ Lynch explains, ‘ that we neglect to ask learners to actually pick up a hammer and build one. And not just once, but over and over and over again.’

Imagining an education technology that would be capable to support personalization and complex 21st century learning, Lynch describes such challenges as creating a large database of meaningful real-world tasks students may encounter, potentially involving simulations and interactive multimedia, as well as technological expertise in designing and collecting performance assessment data that is seamlessly linked to such tasks.

Apart from real-life tasks that support deep, meaningful, and complex learning and valid performance-based assessments, personalized learning, according to Lynch, should include collaboration as well. This idea is supported by Andrew Miller who agrees that students must master collaborative competencies along with other competencies focused on content and success skills. Though personalized learning does focus on the individual student, it is impossible for learners to meet collaborative competencies alone. ‘As students find their passions,’ says Miller, ‘they discover they share passions and interests with others in the classroom and form affinity groups to implement group projects and learning experiences’.

More to that, personalization is not a model of teaching where students determine everything. Miller is convinced that the teacher plays a critical role in personalized learning. According to him, teachers ‘support student collaboration and scaffold appropriate skills’ as well as ‘serve as a sort of coach, supporting students in reflecting on their choices ‘, these tasks being the critical elements of education that technology cannot provide.

To sum it up, it is crucial to understand that personalization should be looked upon as an approach to learning rather than a set program and is much more multifaceted to be simplified to edtech or mere individual pacing.

There’s been much talk lately about whether or not a practicing designer needs formal education. So is formal design education a must or a derelict?

Are the existing formal design courses up-to-date and is it at all possible to keep pace with the rapidly developing trends? Are there any alternatives to the expensive design education? With all the design books, conferences, and distance-learning websites that offer virtual educational opportunities, is it possible to compile your portfolio and ‘sell’ it to potential employers without a degree?

The opinion that before you step into profession you have to forget everything you learned in school is not new. Douglas Davis, a former adjunct professor at New York University in the M.S. in Integrated Marketing program, current HOW Design university contributor, is sure that perpetually shifting landscape in the field of design makes it impossible to teach everything in school because ‘as soon as one convergence starts, the search for the next competitive edge begins’. Recognizing new trends in the industry, writing a new course, getting it department approved, sending it to a university senate curriculum committee, making changes, having it approved, and then offering that course can take up to a year or more. Further still, the change happens much faster than the time it takes to go from freshman to first day.

No doubt, today’s computer programs will soon be outdated and familiar design processes will be reimagined, so it is only natural that one is skeptical about universities claiming their graduating students will be fully prepared to work on a professional design. That is why, advocates of formal education point out, you can never underestimate the value of learning how to learn. The well-known author and the co-chair of the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York Steven Heller believes, ‘formal education teaches one to learn, and only a few privileged self-starters can achieve this, be it from books or osmosis, without guidance’. Design schools provide a place to learn how to observe, think critically, and solve problems creatively. New York City College of Technology graduate, Kate Ling offers her view that, ‘School’s job here is to teach the constant and then prep the student to have the changes.’

There are many practicing designers who believe your design education begins the day you start a job.  Practice is the key. It is obvious that in the field of design, your portfolio is everything. No matter if you have got a degree or not, it is the best way to access your creativity. If you are able to build a portfolio that shows your abilities and makes you stand out enough on your own, independent of college courses, it  works fine for many clients who look for real-world experience.

However, working on your design portfolio may be more efficient in design school where you
focus solely on soaking in design skills and techniques without having to accommodate to real-world restrictions such as the stress of clients’ concerns and the pressures of work deadlines and budgets.

Jordan DeVos, designer and strategist who used to work in Central Saint Martins – University of the Arts London, is certain that a foundation to a designer’s mindset shouldn’t begin with restrictions, design school being a time and space where client whims don’t derail ideas and budgets don’t hinder creativity.

Design school also lets you work with a broader spectrum of styles and, what is especially important, the portfolio will be critiqued and discussed under the tutelage of professional designers who set briefs for students, visit as guest lecturers, and teach as professors. This is another advantage of formal education: professional mentorship and creative community are a generous resource that isn’t instantly available to a new designer in the industry. ‘Nothing can really take the place of immersion in an educational environment which is then combined with experience in the workplace,’ says Heller.

There are also certain practical benefits about the formal education that can boost your career. During the years of study it gives you access to some resources, such as letterpress facilities, computer programs, visiting lecturers, and photography studios, which might be expensive to obtain otherwise and which are certainly crucial when creating a professional portfolio. After graduation, design education might be a competitive edge as it might assure future employers that the candidate is experienced in working with teams, in mastering skills, in meeting deadlines, and accomplishing goals, which in its turn might influence their hiring decision or help remove the glass ceiling.

This is not always the case, so these benefits might not compensate the high tuition costs, with yearly expenditures being higher than what a designer can make two years after graduation.

The final product – the design work itself – is the ultimate credential, and degree is not essential for that. There is an opposite opinion, however, not only among design educators but among the so-called self-taught designers as well.

Steven Heller, who never graduated with a design degree, admits that though he used to think design education was a colossal waste of time, he has come to the conclusion that good instincts and talent are not enough in the profession. Not enough basic knowledge can result in reinventing a wheel over and over, and even constant practice in the workplace might be insufficient if you practice all wrong. ‘Passion is useful, but justifying decisions to others solely on the basis of ‘It feels good’ extends only so far before one is labelled a dithering nabob of emotional excess’, says Heller.

‘Formal education does not, however, replace instinct and passion with rote and reflexive methods,’ he goes on. ‘What it does is provide tools for harnessing those enigmatic traits. Formal education imparts standards of competency’.

Matteo Bologna, the founding partner and creative director of Mucca Design and former board member of AIGA/NY, says: ‘I didn’t go to design school but wish I had. Making a success of yourself is very tough without having someone to teach you how not to make mistakes’.

So the question is: are there any alternatives to formal education that can provide its benefits, such as professional mentorship and creative community, as well as offer real-world experience, without draining one’s budget?

The radical solution by British design graduate Stacie Woolsey has proved it is possible. Priced out of further education, she approached practicing designers she admired, asked each of them to set her design briefs – an idea she describes as “freelance learning” – and completed all four briefs over 18 months of self-directed study. Woolsey didn’t feel that she could burden the designers with every question, so she started approaching industry professionals her age across a variety of fields and asked them to be mentors, thus building her own network of peers – one of the benefits of attending an established institution – turning to them for project-related advice and support. “Whenever I was taking a portfolio around, no one asked what qualification I got or what grade I got. It was all about the work,” Woolsey sums up. Now she plans to replicate her model for a group of students who similarly cannot afford formal education.

Nevertheless, given all the above, it is difficult not to agree with Ellen Shapiro, principal of Visual Language LLC in Irvington, NY, who justly remarks, if the need to go to work and earn money weren’t an issue, if tuition fees had been magically paid, wouldn’t many self-taught designers have jumped at the chance to spend time in classes with great teachers and immerse themselves in art and culture, form and structure?

Talks and disputes about the quality of modern architecture education have been going on for a couple of years already.

A large section of the profession thinks that educators are failing at our sole task: to train students for practice. Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid Architects principal and a guest professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard as well as the head of the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory, criticized the existing approach to architecture schooling in his Facebook post entitled “13 theses on the crisis of architectural academia”.

Read more →

For many years, fashion, perhaps more than any other creative sphere, has been biased with narrow ideas of who should be included in the industry. Even today, the industry has a lot of work to do when it comes to inclusivity and diversity — race, gender, body size, or disability. And although this seems to be the-chicken-and-the-egg situation, there are many reasons to believe that to break the obsolete societal norms within the industry, we need to start not from the runways or editorial spreads, but from the fashion education as the true birthplace of the thinking and practices of the next generation, which shapes the future of the industry.

Dr. Ben Barry, former Chair and Associate Professor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the Ryerson School of Fashion, in Toronto and new Dean of Fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York City, has rightfully noted that typically, when talking about inclusion in fashion, we talk about welcoming or inviting groups who have been excluded, in. However, he goes on, this has to be changed, for in many ways, this approach assumes that they are invited into a place that operates on values and principles and practices that are not theirs.

According to Barry, in fashion education “we try to teach one way of thinking about and practicing fashion rather than valuing the diverse ways of knowing fashion and practicing fashion,” and this needs to be reformed.  From the USA and Canada, where Barry comes from, to the UK and EU, programming has largely remained unchanged, offering the same fundamental courses including pattern making and creation, construction, business management, and styling. Not only much of what is taught centres on European fashion, tailoring and designs, only rarely and marginally touching on other forms of dress; the same can be said of the business side of fashion, including supply chain management, labour practices and commerce. The debates about the white and Western-cehtric canon has been ongoing in many creative disciplines, but in fashion schools students also have to deal with a culture that praises specific types of bodies.

Not often students are taught about the different range and types of individuals, including plus-size bodies and disabled bodies; generally the marginalized groups remain excluded from the fashion education system. For instance, in 2016, Nayyara Chue, a fashion design student at Parsons School of Design in New York City, petitioned to the school that she would be unable to finish her collection, as they didn’t have plus-size mannequins. Izzy Camilleri, the owner and designer behind IZ Adaptive, confesses that having been taught to design clothes in a traditional way she found herself unprepared to the numerous limitations disabled people face around clothing. She explains that making adaptive clothing is so much more than just designing, pattern making, and drafting, for on top of that, it has to do with learning to understand the issues that people with physical disabilities face.

Students of colour are similarly alienated by fashion institutions. Last year, many prestigious and influential design schools and universities were facing accusations of racism, despite pledging support of Black Lives Matter on social media.

According to data from Hesa, the UK’s higher education statistics authority, and the National Center for Education Statistics in the US, despite diversity, equality and inclusion policies, student and staff recruitment in UK and US higher education largely remains white. While research has proved that same race teachers positively affect student attainment levels and academic progress, only 6% of full-time faculty in US universities were Black in autumn 2018, compared to 73% of white staff. In the UK, the proportion was 2%.  “We perform race equality; we have wonderful policies, great legislations, but nothing changes because fundamentally the structures remain unchanged,” says Heidi Safia Mirza, professor of race, faith and culture at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of Dismantling Race in Higher Education.

Apart from the lack of diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, students and alumni accuse fashion schools of nepotism and classism, which goes hand in hand with discrimination. They claim that wealthy, predominantly white, students with connections have an apparent advantage over those from lower-income communities, many of whom are people of color. According to Angela Bacskocky, a Textile and Apparel Merchandising and Management professor and program coordinator at Virginia State University, Black graduates are often overlooked if they don’t have the right contacts in the industry, which proves how essential in internships focused on inclusion for minorities are. “These students don’t want a hand out, they want to be given the chance to learn and to be trained and succeed,” she says.

This is echoed by Kimberly Jenkins, assistant professor of fashion studies at Ryerson University, a noted fashion scholar and creator of a groundbreaking class called ‘Fashion and Race’ that ran in 2016-2019 at Parsons: “There are countless Black millennials and Gen Z creatives trying to study fashion, but academic deans and professors are making the experience difficult — dismissing their designs, blocking them out of internships that could transform their lives, denying them mentorships, empathy and support. So there’s this whole generation of black students, graduating by the skin of their teeth or dropping out altogether. It’s a small pool of Black survivors from the fashion education system who may not have the same resources or Rolodex as their white peers.”

Fashion institutions globally are aware of these issues. Though it is impossible to change the whole system in an instant, plenty of schools are slowly starting to implement the fundamentals of diversity and inclusion into their curriculum.

Aiming to decolonize its programming, Parsons has widened its curriculum by including African garment construction and pattern-making strategies in its BFA fashion design course. The school’s fashion students are also taught about taking responsibility for the system in which their collections are being produced, including labour practices, consumption and after life. The appointment of Barry, who helped transform everything from curriculum to hiring practices to prioritize inclusion, decolonization and sustainability at Ryerson University, as Dean of Fashion also proves the school’s intention to shape and introduce new fashion norms.

The University of Arts, London, revalidates its courses every four years to revisit the curriculum under the lense of topics including decolonisation, emerging industry themes and new technologies. In autumn 2020, the institution launched the Decolonising Arts Institute seeking to “challenge colonial and imperial legacies and drive social, cultural and institutional change” through interdisciplinary collaborations, research-based projects and seminars.

At New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion organises a Diversity Ambassador training programme for their faculty, which includes four mandatory sessions. Diversity Ambassadors are then tasked to encourage and support diversity initiatives throughout the campus.

The fashion industry landscape has been undergoing a drastic shift and fashion education, being vital to implementing real change, should follow suit. Ensuring diverse voices are in positions of power will enable to move towards fashion education that does not exclusively center whiteness or thinness or gender normativity but encourages the new generation of talents to express themselves freely.

If you make up your mind to study a creative subject at a university, you will most probably get your share of family members arguing that this kind of a degree will not secure you a job that comes with a decent wage. Despite the work of Sir Ken Robinson and many others, there is a long-held assumption that creativity is not as valuable as STEM subjects these days. In the meantime, the statistics show that creative industries contribute significantly to the economy, which makes one believe that the landscape of what an artist is and does to live a creative life changes.

Although many of us think that “true” artists have to pretend that orbits of art and business never touch, in fact, whether you are a commercial banker or a conceptual artist, we all have to deal with the market. History shows, that despite the popular misconception, artists in all times had to be entrepreneurial, being fundamentally responsible for earning a living. Today, as the career path of artist is changing, public funding for the arts has declined and funding for individual artists is especially difficult to find, artists are self-employed, building their own brands and businesses, and defining themselves what their creative career should look like. The digital age has created unprecedented access and opportunities for artists to reach their audience directly, challenging traditional training and education practices and career expectations. According to 2016 NEA Study, Creativity Connects: Trends and Conditions Affecting U.S. Artists, the population of artists is growing and diversifying, which also means change in the norms about who is considered an artist. Other findings reveal that substantial numbers of artists now work in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways and find work as artists in non-arts contexts.

At the same time, the study confirmed that artist-training programs are not adequately teaching creative students the non-arts skills they need to support their work (business practices, entrepreneurship, and marketing) nor how to effectively apply their creative skills in a range of contexts.

This is echoed by the report by CRE Research for Creative and Cultural Skills (CC Skills) and Arts Council England (ACE), which reveals that 33% of creative businesses identified a skills gap, with the most common gaps being in business marketing and communication skills (53%), and general problem-solving skills (48%). 44% of businesses identified a fundraising skills gap.

This makes the industry’s experts and leaders express their concern about whether higher education institutions are adequately preparing students for careers in art and design. With 66% of recent art school graduates carrying substantial debt as the cost of art degrees increases, students expect their institutions to prepare them with entrepreneurial skills to find or establish creative careers and teach them how to live creative lives. The shift for artist’s independence and a considerable change in the way artists pursue their creative career mean that the conventional approach adopted in education of creatives — the “just focus on your art as if the money part does not exist” approach – should give way to new paradigms.

While the incredible success of the UK’s art and cultural sector, which brings  hundreds billion pounds to the country’s economy, has resulted in a desperate need for managerial skills in creative industry, only a few arts and design schools and career service departments are taking note, offering courses in creative and professional practice as well as entrepreneurship. For example, in Australia, UNSW Art & Design has rethought its design degree, encouraging students to be entrepreneurial in their thinking. The university even offers a start-up accelerator that provides art and design students opportunities to incubate new business ideas.

In the meantime, only 34% of recent art school alumni believe their institution helped them develop entrepreneurial skills during the years of their education. Another survey initiated by US’s Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) shows that 71% of arts graduates indicated managerial skills were “Very” or “Somewhat important” to their profession or work life but only 26% of alumni reported their institution helped them develop entrepreneurial skills “Some” or “Very much.” In total, the difference between these responses was 45%, leaving a substantial gap between the reported need for managerial skills and the number of alumni who feel they attained them at their institution.

According to the research by Alec Dudson, founder of Intern Magazine, nine out of ten creative students say they do not even receive any insight into how to price their work, which leads to them being exploited early in the career, either as a freelancer or working in-house. Dudson points it out that only few art and design programmes have a ‘professional practice’ module embedded and even if they do, it seldom runs across each of the three years. In cases where there is no module-level provision, career departments and employability teams are left to pick up the slack, while being restricted to sign-up sessions and ‘employability weeks’.

In addition to developing artistic techniques, contemporary artists have to master managerial, financial, and organizational skills that are essential to manage the business side of their creative practice, early on in their art school education. The fundamental list of skills includes business and career planning tools, strategies to market and sell their work, basic budgeting and financial management, legal requirements for protecting creative works, communication and negotiation skills, and networking tools to succeed in the digital world.

Holding both an MBA and an MFA in painting, Amy Whitaker, Assistant Professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture and an author outside of academia, believes that teaching business to artist should be, however, broader than merely teaching them how to market their work. Her approach comprises presenting business as a set of structural tools and building blocks that anyone can use in service of their larger, non-business lives. She encourages creative students to embrace business not as “an identity or a belief system, but a skill — like writing or calculating or drawing.” “Like any other medium — wood, oil paint, steel — capitalism has strengths and weaknesses,” she writes. “It is only by understanding those possibilities and limitations that you can use the medium well.”

To thrive in their creative career, artists do not have to become business people but they do need to understand business. This means that art schools and design education institutions must move towards a mode of teaching that properly trains their graduates to navigate the creative industry effectively.

Cultural norms these days are changing quicker than some of us could keep up with. Even the study of such a seemingly stable discipline as art history has turned out to be controversial. Back in January, Yale University announced it would eliminate its popular survey course “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present,” in response to student complaints that its curriculum promoted an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an white, straight, European and male cadre of artists — at the expense of other narratives. This was followed by heated debate both in mainstream and social media: should universities teach traditional art history surveys or not?

The decades-old Yale’s art history survey course, covering the evolution of art from 1300 to the present time, has been one of the department’s quintessential classes and most popular offerings. This spring, however, it was taught for the last time. As Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim  Barringer explained, the course was “problematic,” because it put European art on a pedestal, at the expense of other artistic traditions “equally deserving of study.”

The last, 2020 edition of the course was taught with an array of modifications. This year, the emphasis was placed on the relationship between European art and other world traditions. The class considered art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race’” and discussed its involvement with such issues as Western capitalism and climate change. The 300 students of the course were also invited to write an essay nominating a work of art that has been left out of the course’s curriculum or its textbook.

According to Yale Daily News, instead of this singular survey class, the Art History Department will offer a range of others, such as “Art and Politics,” “Global Craft,” “The Silk Road” and “Sacred Places.” Barringer added that in two or three years, his department will offer a substitute class to “Introduction to Art History.” But the new class “will be a course equal in status to the other 100-level courses, not the introduction to our discipline claiming to be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins,” Barringer said.

New introductory courses will be added in the next few years, but they will not be billed as a comprehensive survey. Wanting to deflect accusations of iconoclasm, Barringer — himself a specialist in European art — presented the move as “expansive rather than reductive,” positioning the changes as part of an effort “to offer Yale undergraduates a range of introductory courses that do justice to the diversity of our faculty’s research, of Yale’s collections, and of the student body itself.”

The news elicited a maelstrom of opinions online, causing particular unrest among conservatives who perceive the change as a disservice to students looking for a broad overview course, rather than more specialized offerings. A headline in the conservative journal Commentary read “Yale’s Art Department Commits Suicide.” The New York Post labeled it ‘PC idiocy’, while the renowned critic James Panero in his article in the Spectator simply likened Yale’s art-history department head to Joseph Stalin.

Those opposed to the new development argue that the history of art reflects the history of the world. No matter if we like it or not, the Renaissance was “intertwined with the rise of modern banking, a time when power-hungry and wealthy patrons used art for self-glorification”, and colonialism. However, they warn art historians against erasing the past with its glories and warts, for this will only leave future generations of students ignorant. Failing to understand the evolution of art, The New York Post writes, the students won’t be able to criticize it. Nor will they be able to appreciate other artistic traditions and customs, for they will have nothing to compare these to.

The conservative media also make a point that although Yale claims the introductory course is being eliminated in response to student uneasiness, the interest in the course among undergraduates skyrocketed following the news that this will be the last time it is taught. During the school’s shopping period, when students sit in on potential courses before officially enrolling, more than 400 people attended the semester’s “Introduction to Art History” class, though the course is capped at 300 due to space constraints. This fact is considered to serve as a proof that the decision to drop the course in fact comes from the top, not the students.

However, other experts rightfully note that the debate whether the curriculum should be reshaped in response to the overall the “globalization” of art history or not has been going on for decades within every art history program in the country.

Dushko Petrovich, Professor at Boston University and Rhode Island School of Design and lecturer in painting/printmaking at Yale, points it out that although art history maintained an “overwhelmingly European focus” since it had been established in Europe in the middle of the 19th century, the earliest survey texts were not focused exclusively on the West. He refers to the essay “Origins of the Art History Survey Text” by Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, and a historian of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. According to Schwarzer, many of the discipline’s foundational tomes were decidedly global. Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Art History, published in Germany in 1842, declared itself the first comprehensive book on the subject and had geographic span to match. Debuting a year later, Karl Schnaase’s eight-volume History of the Fine Arts argued that belief systems inherited across cultures were key to understanding any civilization’s artworks, and Anton Heinrich Springer’s detail-oriented studies emphasized the inclusion of all peoples as an organizing principle.

However, art from beyond the West – Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas – were presented in the books as Schwarzer put it, as “foundation stones for the development of higher forms of artistic expression in Europe.” Wishing to establish hierarchies of achievement among nations, early art historians settled on ancient Greece and medieval Germany as the highest points on this vast timeline. The connection between classical and Renaissance culture laid the foundation for the subsequent high point: modern Europe. After this, Schwarzer writes, “non-European art was almost completely excluded from the later and crucial stages of art historical development.”

What we see happening today is in fact an attempt to rethink this traditional approach to art history and re-educate ourselves. Due to the civil rights and the women’s movements and the subsequent shift in students demographics, art history as discipline is moving on too. In 1995, Mark Miller Graham, a historian of Mesoamerican art, wrote in “Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey” issue of Art Journal, “I don’t think that there is now any justification for confining the introductory courses in art history to the art of the West.”

Petrovich welcomes the shift that is ongoing in Yale and the universities in the country. He passes an opinion that thematic courses (such as Yale’s four new aforementioned offerings) “reach across geography and chronology without any claim of comprehensiveness or canonicity”, thus doing a “fair job of summarizing the variations that are possible with this approach, where ideas, materials, trade routes, or social uses of art can all be used to narrate an introduction to the field.”

He also mentions that as few faculty have the expertise to teach a truly global class on their own, a common solution will most likely be “team-teaching,” with several voices replacing the “old man tells you everything you need to know” model of teaching, as critic and former art historian Aruna D’Souza put it.

Denying the influence of Western art would surely mean dismissing its great truth and beauty. Still, the truth is there has never been just one story of the history of art, but rather a host of narratives surrounding the history of engagement with art, architecture, images and objects across time and place. There is every reason to believe that and the art history surveys that we will see in the future will most likely offer students a variety of voices that will educate them on the topics the generations of their predecessors were ignorant of.