Ten things they never taught in design school, and one thing they did

I recently read a post by Michael McDonough called the “Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School”, and previous post by McDonough called “Graphic Design and the New Certainties”, as well as its follow-up comments.

In his most recent posting, he seems to be looking back on his education, and pointing out the real-world lessons that are lacking in design school, and in the previous posting he speculates about secret cravings of designers, and their definitions of design. In the follow-up to that posting, a set of questions are posted by a certain Michael B., who wonders why designers spend so much time scratching out their purpose in life, and while they are doing that, not productively designing.

I think that kind of philosophy is one thing we DID learn in design school, or if not, at least innately carry around with us. But then again, it’s all just part of our career, and the type of people we are. To pick up on one responder to Michael’s comment, Rick Poyner states, that “Design's professional uncertainties are unusual, though. Do dentists agonise about their calling like this? Do hotel managers? Do bus drivers? One essential difference with design is that it's a form of public communication, and that takes us into questions of identity, representation, the public good and, yes, even politics.”

Designers come in all sorts, some are much more business focused, and some are very creative, but I think many designers still tend to look in at themselves and question the jobs we do just to make sure that we uphold our values. We have the ability, in fact it is our job to communicate, and even though we just design someone else’s product, and then leave, we become as much an owner of the product as the client, because we have invested our aesthetic abilities and our best efforts into the work. A dentist’s questions might include the tools, techniques, and methods for carrying out root canals. A designer’s questions are usually deeper, and more personal than that, regarding our own identities and roles in the communication of information. But relative to our respective fields of work, the questions are the same.

It is a question asked of all design students, some from art backgrounds, and some even “muggle-born” designers before entering the real world. We were asked to define design and our role in it to ourselves and to the world. For students, it’s a way of aligning ourselves with the personalities who we will be working with for the rest of our lives, especially if we work in studios. It’s not something that is tested or questioned officially in any course, although it acts as the first opportunity for us to put to words what we have learned over the last four years and create a mission statement of sorts, a set of goals and values that we can look back on in five years and either correct according to reality, find we need to re-align ourselves with, or satisfactorily find that we have lived out thus far.

I think that for a profession comprised of so many creative, value centred individuals, this set of questions is not a bad set of tools to carry around in our back pockets, along with our USB keys and graphite pencils, useful especially when starting a new project, or faced with communicating new, and possibly controversial set of issues to design of in our career.

For further reading, here are the things we weren’t taught in design school!