Dear Colleagues,

Ken is correct. There are many challenges that need to be faced on both
sides, that is, in design education and in practice. I will speak to the
former.

Clearly, many segments of the design education community‹especially those
located in the art and design community‹are at a watershed. What use to be
the bread-and-butter skills associated with industrial design, graphic
design and even architecture, such as drafting, rendering, model making and
form giving, are being outsourced. These were the so-called hard skills and
were the very tangible evidence of design practice. Most were visible in
both the curriculum of design programs and in the output of the students.
Now we read that design firms such as IDEO are contemplating the off-shoring
of the form-making aspect of the design process to their Shanghai office
because ten industrial designers can be hired in China for the cost of one
in the USA. Other firms have gone beyond contemplation: they have outsourced
the design work most closely associated with hard skills.

The aforementioned watershed is leading design education to contemplate the
addition of and increased concentration on soft skills. In one of my large
freshman design classes an invited speaker who is well-known graphic
designer was rather blunt about soft skills when he stated that knowing
Photoshop and Illustrator, which are hard skills, will not get you a job
with his office. His question to my students equally blunt. ³Can you think?
Until you can show me that you can think I do not have use for you.² By the
way, Thinking 101 is not yet a course in our curriculum. On a similar note,
another invited guest speaker to our college‹a well known industrial
designer but trained first as a social scientist‹shocked an audience of
industrial design students when he said that he doesn¹t regularly hire
graduates from industrial design programs. When asked why he replied that
designers, unlike scientists, are not trained to be skeptical, a soft skill
with which most scientists are familiar. Yet another guest, a recently
retired executive vice president/research and design of a leading American
furniture manufacturer stated much the same when he said that the most
important skill for designers was the ability to communicate...another soft
skill.

The soft skills already mentioned as well as others are often implicit in
design education but not always. Consequently, there is a need to make them
explicit and to integrate these skills‹critical thinking, communication, and
research, to name but a few‹into the traditional curricular framework, i.e.,
hard skills, of most professional design programs. To not do so will not
address the growing rationale for outsourcing and off-shoring. Worse still,
we may be educating designers for jobs that will not exist in five years, at
least not in the USA.

Jacques Giard, PhD
Professor and Director

Cross-College Programs
BA/MSD/PhD
College of Design
Arizona State University
PO Box  2105 
Tempe, AZ 85287-2105

T 480.965.1373
F 480.965.9656

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