Rethinking Design Education What Should a Progressive D-School Curriculum Look Like

One of the most important instruments for influencing a student's education is the curriculum. The 2023 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report predicts that by 2030, the growth of AI, the demand for sustainability, and the use of big data would have altered over 40% of occupational abilities.

According to UNESCO's recent web article, the imperative is toward developing lifelong learning and interdisciplinarity in students in order to prepare them for the complexity of the future. In their generation, rapid technological, environmental, and social changes urgently call for a rethink of higher education across disciplines.

In this changing scenario, the roles of design schools everywhere would be entirely different by the year 2030. Most of the design programs these days align their curricula with theoretical concepts and cases that are already outdated, while mastery of tools and techniques includes the primary ones, such as typography and sketching.

On the other hand, designers who can look beyond the aesthetic solution of systems design for complex challenges are in increasing demand. As a matter of fact, the whole design industry, which once was about sketching, ergonomics, and prototyping, is adapting to make room for subjects such as artificial intelligence, bio-design, extended reality (XR), robotics, and sustainability technologies-issues that today are the new essentials in a creative curriculum.

Leading design schools around the world, such as MIT Media Lab from the US, L'École de design Nantes Atlantique from France, Parsons School of Design from the US, Royal College of Art from the UK, Stanford d.school from the US, and The Design Village from India, have already taken important steps to adapt to this new reality. It is this transition that other design schools around the world should embark on. The new framework needs to concentrate on: Transdisciplinary Knowledge: For designers to become more deeply trained in tackling some of society's increasingly complex and interconnected problems, they would need a transdisciplinary approach-one that incorporates knowledge and methods but also the perspectives from technology, social sciences, environmental studies, and the arts. This will also give designers a better understanding of how to work with other professionals in dealing with uncertainty and co-creating meaningful futures. Tech Collaboration: Technology needs to be integrated within the curriculum of global design colleges in the form of AI - understanding generative AI, algorithmic limits, and ethical risks; Big Data - using Big Data for underpinning design decisions and for assessing impact; Metaverse - to use AR, VR, and XR for immersive prototyping and experiential storytelling; and Robotics - for them to understand technology and design interactions for adaptive systems, wearables, and responsive environments. Ethics and Policy: The rapid changes in the creative industry, along with recognition of the design process in non-creative industries, means design schools will have to institutionalize courses on IP rights, legal implications of creative work, policy-sensitive design, ethical literacy, etc. New Material & Fabrication Practices: Design schools, by 2030, need to change the emphasis of regular material and prototyping courses toward circular materials, computational fabrication, net-zero prototyping, and embedding sustainability metrics. In the future, courses will have to put emphasis on a 'creative' and 'critical' lens whereby students test out ideas and explore material behavior, but also understand the ecological and ethical and technological implications of production.

Future designers' education will need to be rethought by design schools. They will need to educate designers who can contribute significantly to the development of ethical technology, sustainable economies, and inclusive societies—designers who simultaneously think like artists, anthropologists, and scientists. Only when global d-schools institute this expanded role of designers will the world be in a position to leverage the full potential of design.