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Hi Tim, You wrote 'design is a way of being in the world' and 'This can be taught'. Wondering how you feel you would choose what to include in the curriculum and the underlying principles to validate how students are assessed? Wondering how you 'know' that there are many good designers coming out of design schools? Perhaps they could be many times better? Many good ones also implies some bad ones - yet they have the same qualification.... Warm regards, Terence == Tim Smithers wrote: Is designing well understood, and thus well taught as a skill set? I don't think so. To me, designing is a way of being in the world. This can be taught. There is plenty of evidence for this in the many good and great designers to come out of the many good and great Design Schools around the world over the past many years. Designers have always had to deal with changing conditions. Indeed it is the designers who often provoke some of these changes, and push them along. Designers are always looking to use new materials, new fabrication and construction methods and techniques, new tools and systems--which they often steal from others, engineers, scientists, and artists. This is an important part of being in the world as a designer. So, good design schools can't know what designing will be doing in five years time. They will be forming the designers who will go out and make what the world is in five years time. Any mistaken attempt to foresee the future like this will result in failed designers. Design Schools do need to teach the good use of techniques and tools, but this is so that student designers can do designing like it is really done today, and so learn by doing. This skill teaching should also show them that, as designers, they will need to spend the rest of their designing lives learning to use new tools and techniques, of being a part of developing these, and of pioneering them.