Changing Design Education for the 21st Century

Designers are entrusted with increasingly complex and impactful challenges. However, the current system of design education does not always prepare students for these challenges. When we examine what and how our system teaches young designers, we discover that the most valuable elements of the designer’s perspective and process are seldom taught. Instead, some designers grow beyond their education through their experience working in industry, essentially learning by accident. Many design programs still maintain an insular perspective and an inefficient mechanism of tacit knowledge transfer. Meanwhile, skills for developing creative solutions to complex problems are increasingly essential. Organizations are starting to recognize that designers bring something special to this type of work, a rational belief based upon numerous studies that link commercial success to a design-driven approach. So, what are we to do? Other learned professions such as medicine, law, and business provide excellent advice and guidance embedded within their own histories of professionalization. In this article, we borrow from their experiences to recommend a course of action for design. It will not be easy: it will require a study group to make recommendations for a roster of design and educational practices that schools can use to build a curriculum that matches their goals and abilities. And then it will require a conscious effort to bootstrap the design profession toward both a robust practitioner community and an effective professoriate, capable together of fully realizing the value of design in the 21st century. In this article, we lay out that path. •Designers can bring special value to almost all organizations: governments, Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), businesses, healthcare, etc.•The current system of design education seldom prepares students for the challenges that they will face.•The most valuable elements of the designer’s perspective and process are seldom taught.•Other learned professions such as medicine, law, and business provide excellent advice and guidance embedded within their own histories of professionalization.•To make changes requires a major long-term effort to develop a platform of design and educational practices.•We call for a program to move the design profession capable of fully realizing the value of design in the 21st century.