How Design Thinking Will Bring About Transformation Design Education

Design education has come under fire. Its value and rationality are in question and rightly so. The design industry is going through seismic shifts. But as designers, shifting a perspective can reveal great insights. Instead of seeing the importance of design education in terms of job preparedness for a recent graduate, we also consider how a degree can build some basic foundation for creativeness, impact, and ambition. Education’s major role is to plant the seeds to achieve greatness. Well, DOT School of Design is processed by the belief that by providing students with a project-based, internship-oriented curriculum, they are empowered to become great and responsible designers who work towards a better tomorrow.

Combining Design Thinking & Design Education

Design thinking is about how we use our minds to solve a problem. Design education, in addition, involves teaching students the talents of design thinking and preparing them to become great in their respective fields. Students start by taking a problem and understanding the nuances of it and then brainstorming possible solutions, then finally prototyping new products and experiences. With this approach, students are ready to make something great that has the potential to vary the planet.
Design thinking educates us with the fashionable age skills that students got to succeed. Success today relies on an innovative way of thinking, and that’s exactly what design thinking can teach students. Design is going through a great stage of change since the last decade, but design education and more specifically design educators haven’t maintained these transformations. As a result, students still learn outdated methods and techniques. A designer needs to understand the processes, methods and mediums of design respectively. At all of these levels, the process is the same, as the methods may change slightly and the medium also differs dramatically.

Possible Opportunities in Design Education

Without expertise in mediums, a designer is only able to facilitate what others do, they become a means or a manager, a step-in communication, repeating existing content without adding value. This makes such an individual easily replaceable. Design education usually places stress on medium, mostly at the expense of methods and processes. Students get to learn a process, but they quite often learn without comprehending. Design fields offer a lot of job opportunities such as animator, ceramic designer, creative copywriter, fashion designer, fine artist, furniture designer, glassblower, UX/UI designer, graphic designer, photographer, interior designer, multimedia artist, art director, advertising manager, product designer, web designer, film and video editors, industrial designers and so on.

Without understanding the planning process, design students cannot understand a design problem, or the way to add constraints so as to shape the matter into something that is manageable. We need to find a way to educate the future designers, helping them with a firmer grasp of the design processes and a variety of methods, in other words, comprehensive expertise of a medium.

About the author

Keerthana Ramesh is a junior Architect and an Assistant Design educator at DOT School of Design. She has a keen interest in sustainable architecture and various techniques in mud architecture. Keerthana considers herself to be in the process of refinement and every day as an opportunity to identify herself through her creations.

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely author’s own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha