Taking the plunge to study for a career in any field is a bold and purposeful step in life. To pursue a creative career takes perhaps an even bolder leap of faith when the array of potential work roles is so diverse and constantly evolving. Design roles today are no exception.
More younger adults are now said to be pursuing greater flexibility, self-employment and passion-driven work (e.g. OECD, 2023). As an adult in mid-life, my initial design education in the 1990s is still powering my career into its fourth decade and despite losing count of the number of roles and types of employment, passion, values and flexibility still drive my work.
Perhaps the key charm of a design education is that it can support you to design your career as an ongoing work-in-progress, driven by your own curiosity, values and interests. While technology continues to radically re-shape forms of work and job roles, the big business-aligned World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report (WEF, 2023) identifies several skills in the top 10 list of ‘skills on the rise’ that are also core threads within design expertise:
- Creative thinking
- Analytical thinking
- Technical literacy
- Curiosity and lifelong learning
- Motivation and self-awareness
- Resilience, flexibility and agility
- Systems thinking
- AI and big data (WEF, 2023).
The portability and transferability of design skills
Testing the claim that design education has powered my career journey, I challenged myself to identify the skills and know-how that have been most portable and transferable through its many phases. They’ve been deepened by interest, expanded by further study and enriched by life experiences along the way, but all have been applied in every job role, one way or another:
Observation and documentation
Drawing and diagramming
Layout, type and colour to communicate to different audiences
Creative, analytical and critical thinking
Conceptual exploration, ideation, prototyping and iteration
Empathy, human needs analysis and accessibility
Human-environment relations
Problem framing, inquiry, scenario-making and storytelling
Learning new technologies and software, including their interfaces, affordances and limitations
Communicating system elements, flows, and connections
Scoping, devising and managing projects
And I could go on …
Snapshots of career journeying (and forks in the road)
To give a flavour of the variety of design roles made possible by the skills and know-how above, these are a few of my career snapshots over time. Opportunities and dilemmas arose, of course, so I’ve reflected on the curiosity-driven moves and values that prompted me to see a fork in the road and to forge new pathways.
1991
Junior interior designer working on healthcare, early learning and hospitality environments (Brisbane, Australia)
Forks in the road: how can I practise design in a way that is more enduring and less resource-intensive and wasteful? What kinds of design practice are more sustainable?
2006
Learning designer working on virtual learning environments in higher education, including co-designing support frameworks informed by human-computer interaction and accessibility (York, UK)
Fork in the road: how can I merge my commitment to designing learning opportunities for others with my ‘lifewide learning’ passions for sustainable food and housing?
2011
Design researcher working hands-on with integrating housing, local food systems and ecological living (lutruwita / Tasmania, Australia)
Fork in the road: how can I further develop my practice in ecological design and design for resilience with a wider, diverse design community?
2019
Designer co-developing ecological design practice via teaching and researching design for resilience with international students (Småland, Sweden)
Fork in the road: how can I leverage my systems design experience to combine ecological design practice, research, education and community resilience?
2024
Designer and lecturer researching transition strategies and design roles within purpose-driven businesses and community resilience organisations in the UK and Australia (Milton Keynes, UK).
At each fork, I’ve had to evaluate critically how I might direct my design skills in line with my changing values, also in response to the surprises life and the world throw at us.
The big shifts in design: systems and ‘designing for planet’
Design skills are portable and transferable, yes, but big and necessary shifts in design education and industry are rapidly underway. The UK Design Council recently published the Design Economy Green Design Skills Gap Report (Design Council, 2024) which re-frames design as an essential green transition skill. Of the 1068 UK designers who responded, 71% foresee demand growing for ‘design for planet skills’ while only 43% see their current capability as adequate (UK Design Council, 2024, p. 9).
While it is very helpful to identify and list ‘design for planet skills’ (see p. 12 of the same report), in design learning and practice such knowledge and skills need to be well-integrated and grounded in practical social-ecological contexts. In my experience, for example, bioregional food systems have served as a powerful entry pathway for designers to develop more holistic ecological design capabilities which are inherently systemic and grapple with the complex social, cultural and technological factors at play in ‘designing for planet’. This reflects a very different design pathway, I would argue, to other growing design fields that have been harnessed as in-service industries to big tech corporations and global finance. This picks up my earlier point about needing to decide how to direct your design skills and capabilities.
A further example with tremendous synergies for our capability development – as learners, practitioners and teachers of design – is the integrative Planetary Health Education Framework (Planetary Health Alliance, 2021) in which the health and wellbeing of all people is contingent on the health of the planet. Part of the framework’s aim is to:
“[I]nspire all peoples across the globe to create, restore, steward, and conserve healthy ecosystems for a thriving human civilization. We envisage that the framework will contribute to positive outcomes for the biosphere, overcoming the Planetary Health challenges before us” (PHA, 2021, p.3).
While this may suggest a universalist mission, the framework stresses diversity of peoples and knowledges, contextual and cultural differences underpinning social justice and equity, and great urgency in shifting our approaches and practices. All resonate strongly in my design practice as it has evolved and indeed, in how new design education is currently being crafted at The Open University.
We offer a warm welcome this October; do bring your curiosity and passion and prepare to embrace those forks in the road!
References
Design Council, 2024. Design Economy – Green Design Skills Gap Report. Accessed 21 June, 2024:
https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/design-economy/#c8020
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2023. The Missing Entrepreneurs 2023: Policies for Inclusive Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment. Accessed 21 June, 2024:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/2f11a3fe-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/2f11a3fe-en
Planetary Health Alliance, 2021. Planetary Health Education Framework. Accessed 21 June, 2024: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wg2zJnKj-wlGN5qK8EXC0Y2lqUwMUQNV/view
World Economic Forum (WEF), 2023. The Future of Work Report 2023. Accessed 20 June, 2024:
https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/infographics-2128e451e0/
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