gagement with complex issues and problems, especially those that cannot be ‘solved’ in a linear sense, only iteratively improved over time and place,” writes former Parsons Dean and New School Provost Tim Marshall in “Designing Design Education,” the cover story of the German magazine Form (January 2009). In recent years, the role of design has expanded dramatically to include addressing changing social and economic contexts and faltering political institutions in need of major reform. The place of design has also shifted with the growth of organizations that nurture human interaction rather than producing goods. (Have you signed up for Facebook yet?) National conversations responding to the call to service and atmosphere of hope ushered in by the Obama administration have prominently featured design and designers. Historically, most design clients were commercial entities with little interest in the long-term effects of their projects. With government agencies and nonprofit organizations recognizing the need to plan for sustainability, design now contends with a new kind of commitment, which is changing the design process and the role of the designer. This puts a new spin on the idea of time-based design.
The Transformation of the Designer’s Role It’s always been part of designers’ DNA to learn on the spot about a given client’s market, but they now face additional challenges. The sheer scale of design intervention has changed the designer’s role from a notion of leadership into a more collaborative, horizontal, and authorless process, where he or she has to learn how to leverage various parties’ points of views and orchestrate them strategically to find viable solutions. As a result, today’s creative professional has become less an expert than a mediator, or facilitator. Last February, Metropolis magazine published IDEO’s “Ten Tips for Creating a 21st-Century Classroom Experience,” an article in which this idea is discussed. IDEO, a global consultancy generally considered the bellwether of the shift from “design making” to “design thinking,” offered the following advice: “Stop calling them ‘soft skills.’ Talents such as creativity, collaboration, communication, empathy, and adaptability are not just nice to have; they’re the core capabilities of a 21st-century global economy facing complex challenges.” The term “capabilities” rather than “skills” implies a much more dynamic understanding of the new (dis)order. Capability is the ability to acquire a skill that one might not necessarily have already. It reflects a changing world in which nothing is set in stone, where fluidity, agility, and a certain humility are essential to both survival and practice. Advice to young designers: Keep things in perspective and get down from your ivory tower; you don’t know what tomorrow’s job will be—or how many jobs you’ll have down the road. Joel Towers, dean of the School of Design Strategies, says, “Our program is capabilitybased, because we are training students for [situations in which] we don’t quite know what the needed skills will be. It’s about bringing versatile capabilities of visualization, of imagination, of looking at problems differently. That’s what our school is really about.” This kind of flexibility, traditionally associated with the liberal arts generalist, may define the designer of the future.
“Designers are not used to being in this center position. ‘I’m a radical/ nerd/outsider’ cannot be an excuse anymore. Being creative no longer is what solely defines a designer. Understand your surroundings, the power you wield in design, the impact of what you make.”
JEFF NG, ’97
Communication Design and Technology Alum/Design Strategies faculty Ng (aka Jeff Staple) was among 25 top young American entrepreneurs invited to meet with senior officials from the Obama administration to discuss ways to pull the country out of recession. www.stapledesign.com
“The problems we face in the 21st century are complex and often entrenched. They cannot be solved by any one discipline, and thus the future is one of interdisciplinary work rather than the rise of any discipline in isolation.” Hilary Cottam is a social entrepreneur whose recent projects include community health services designed jointly with users, a radical rethink of the prison system, and a new design for schools of the 21st century. www.hilarycottam.com
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