What Design Education Taught Me

As a designer, one often comes across severe criticism of design education and pedagogy. As a designer, I’m sure you have come across passages that have resonated with the lessons you personally learnt as a young, wide eyed student. I too, expected something similar from my design education but alas, it wasn’t close to my imaginings. 

Design education is a deeply personal experience which is a very careful mix between the knowledge one acquires from their mentors and the personal discipline, systems and sources that one curates as they realize the shortcomings of their schooling (ask any design student about the failings of their education, and you’re in for an hours long chat). I dont think the education system in design is to be blamed as much as the fact that design means different things to each person and hence the kind of education they seek is very different. 

One person may prefer learning from tutorials while the other grasps concepts when taught individually. This is a consistent realisation ive come across as I spoke to more of my classmates and tried to understand their disappointments about the things they were being taught. Every year of college brings different lessons along with it but there are a few recurring themes that occur each year. These are the lessons that I hope to never forget because they’ve helped realign myself when the desire for perfection in work gets overwhelming. 

The Value Of Research

Even though this is taught formally, every person needs to keep developing this skill. The amount of work you put into your work begins much before you actually get into creating it. The planning, preparation, articulation begins when you try to understand the problem and your deliverables. The research we do informs the project in ways that aren’t always obvious at first. Ive come across many project solutions (as assignment submissions) that pre-existed but the designers hadn’t put in the research and hence weren’t aware of it. Thats one of the most obvious pitfalls. Research is one of the easiest things to go overboard with and thats another valuable lesson that one learns - knowing when to stop. Research informs the work but it can also create apprehension - knowing when to stop is something every individual needs to learn for themselves as they indulge in the practise of it. 

Dont Take Opinion Personally 

Opinions exist in abundance. We can be sure of that as a fact. If a human has 60,000 thoughts in a day, the one thing we can be sure of is that most of those are opinions on something. Its important to be criticised for your work and to know the takeaways from it. Design criticism can enter the realm of personal wounds. This is one of the hardest things to learn but each year, accepting criticism becomes easier as you learn to dissect the opinions you receive about your work. It is natural to feel personally offended when someone doesn’t appreciate the end result of our efforts but it helps to understand their views and accept them if we remember that design is subjective. Summed up concisely, it helps to remember that opinions are not facts.

Design Does Not Sell Itself 

Oh! This lesson! I wish I’d learnt this a year earlier than I did. So often, stepping out of the haze of creation makes a person lose perspective. The project they’ve been working on is something close to them so they’re proud of it and they expect their work to receive praise almost immediately. Thats a fundamental difference between design and art - that our work doesn’t sell unless it doesn’t incentivise the buyer. Often, the product being something that the market needs isnt enough either. Marketing and developing a good social network become the shoulders for your work to stand on.  

What Makes Designers Different - Deadlines

As a young design student, you’re not accustomed to working with deadlines. Every project in out portfolio is a personal one, developed in the time that we believed it would attain perfection in. That changes immediately when you start working on design projects. Every project needs to come full circle by having an end. This took me a while to adjust to, its hard to know when to stop work because one always feels that there’s improvements they can do. Having deadlines on works teaches a person to learn when to put an end to work. It also means that you know ending a project doesn’t mean its finished. 

There’s countless other lessons that become clearer and clearer as I grow. Every project teaches you new things the more you interact with it. Design education is a gift that keeps on giving because they become the years you can go back to when met with a standstill in your work. There’s always an anecdote here, a life hack there to help you resolve problems from those four years that come back to help you.