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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”.

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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.