I am just heading over to Tianjin for the Summer Davos conference where there are several sessions touching on design and design thinking as well as interesting sessions on clean energy and innovation for aging. The focus of the summer version of the famous gathering in Davos, Switzerland, is on what the WEF calls the Global Growth Companies. These are the next generation of fast growing companies, many of them hailing from China, India, South America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. It is these corporations that are likely to become the global 100 of the future. Given all the furor in the financial markets this week it remains to be seen how much attention design gets but there is no doubt that the GGC companies realize the need to build world class design and innovation capabilities.
I met with the Chairman of one of the fastest growing companies in China yesterday and he made it clear that their highest priority is to build internal design and design thinking talent and that he is looking for help in doing this. Almost certainly the biggest obstacle will be the supply of raw talent. Big investments are being made in Singapore and China around design education but it will likely take a lot more to supply just the demand in China. I am interested in trying to identify where the interesting experiments are in design education in Asia? Are there equivalents to the Standford D-school or the IIT design program?
I am an American currently working towards an MDes degree at Hong Kong PolyU. One problem I have noticed is that parents of potential design students are very skeptical about letting their child choose this field of study, much more so than in the United States. It is amazing to see the lengths that our school has to go through to convince these parents that this is a viable option.
Some light on the design education scenario in India – India has around 20
design schools offering UG, PG and Doctorate courses across different
disciplines right from Graphic, UI, Communication, Product, Textile,
Ceramic, Furniture, Interior, Animation, New media, Merchandising, Lifestyle
products to toy design. Although courses in NID (National Institute of
design) and IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) have been the benchmarks
till now.
I have been to IIT Chicago last year and was fortunate to attend one of the
classes by Chris Conley, who heads the graduate product design program in
IIT. It was a great experience. I believe that we lack extensive courses
centered on design planning, methodology and innovation although some of the
schools cover these areas in the initial semesters of their courses. At the
same time, its important to understand that the industrial scenario and role
of designers in the industry is quite different from the west.
As far as demand is concerned, Indian market is one of the largest and
toughest and lot more talent is required to meet the existing demand in the
industries. There are so many untouched industrial sectors where design can
play a crucial role in improving the overall impact of the services offered.
In the last decade substantial efforts were made by the government and
design educators to accentuate the contribution of design towards the
economy. National design policy was formulated in early 2007 for promotion
of design and establishing a healthy platform for integrating technology, business and design.
Greetings Tim,
This is an interesting area to think about and certainly one that I recall discussing while at the Shanghai office. If the roots of innovation and design thinking lie within an educational structure, then China is just now beginning to build that piece. I think the demand for that type of thinking is in the market, but not in the schools – and if it is, it’s in infantile stages. Imagine how exciting it will be to watch how it grows, and very particularly so in the context of the Chinese environment.
Another thought is to see what an Eames “India Report” would look like in China’s context. What would accelerate the design economy further? Is it policy, corporate sponsorship, research institutes, star-architects, … all of the above?
Cheers to experimentation – it’s happening here at RISD now.
Hi Tim,
There are a handful of schools in and outside Beijing that I work very closely with. Activities range from short talks to week-long innovation workshops. This is, in my experience, by far the best way to cultivate and recruit designers in PRC.
Cheers,
Dennis
a very difficult question to answer, simplistically
imho, the structural framework of society (i.e. the design) in parts of Asia simply do not support lateral thinking or the ‘out of the boxness’ required for an ID-IIT or d.school type of approach. Methodology and processes may be replicated easily, but can innate conditioning towards minimizing risk taking, experimentation (with the caveat of failure), the willingness to prototype without knowing all the answers – all the elements, in fact, of ‘design thinking’ be overcome by programs and workshops alone? I don’t know.
There are experiments, certainly, but carefully controlled, I’d say. As the commenter above Chris Hardy says, the primary question when considering such programs becomes “what is the ROI of this education?” i.e. will the graduate get a good stable job? Not something that can be easily answered for the types of programs you are talking about.
I am a Brazilian graphic designer and for the last two years a teacher in the Visual Communication department at the Shanghai campus of Raffles Design Institute, a Singapore based education corporation with schools in 7 chinese cities as well as in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Mongolia, New Zealand and Australia.
RDI is the only International Design College in Shanghai, offering Graphic Design, Interactive Media Multimedia Design, Fashion Design, Interior Design, Product Design and Fashion Marketing. At the VC department alone we have 25 teachers from 18 countries teaching a 3 year program (12 trimesters), in which the third year currently follows (and is supervised by) the University of Northumbria Degree program. Today, VC Shanghai (Graphic and Interactive Media Multimedia Design) has 859 students – 98% chinese – from a total of 2300 students.
http://www.raffles-design.com.cn/school/accademic.asp?file=1
Hi,
We have taken a different approach to Design education and teaching design thinking. It is done directly to engineers in manufacturing industries in India. We work with a group of selected engineers and managers of various manufacturing industries for over a period of 2 to 3 years. They select problems of their choice and then we apply design thinking to those problems to come up with innovative solutions, which once done gives the company benefit for years to come. In this manner, we have been able to improve productivity and profitability of the companies we work with. The broad areas are equipment design, quality, processes, products, packaging, work processes and organizational structures. After working on a number of problems and simultaneously getting exposed to various design topics related to industries (presently 42 of these given in very short doses) the participants develop the knack and skill for design thinking. Of course the degree of accomplishment varies. While some develop very well indeed others might not be so skilled. But they all develop the basic appreciation for design thinking and understand as to how it benefits them. And the most important thing is that people accept the changes very easily since they have worked on the live problems themselves.
We have been experimenting with this methodology for the last ten years with some selected top notch progressive minded companies and the success rate for the companies is now 100%.
Seeing the success the top management of these companies are now sold to Design Innovation and Design thinking and trying to incorporate these concepts in a committed fashion in their industries.
So, this might be an alternative way to educate people on ‘Design Thinking’.
Hi Tim,
A good personal example would be my own experience in Singapore. As the pioneer batch of Industrial Design degree program in NUS, I can’t help but feel like a lab rat myself. We had a very ‘dynamic’ curriculum 9 years ago with a clear focus on inculcating & nurture Design Thinking skills to program candidates but a distinctively confused way going about it. The dilemma lies in striking a balance between teaching the hard skills (Modeling, Drafting, Rendering, etc) and the softer skills (Design Thinking methodology and philosophy). The program ultimately chose soft skills over hard skills and a generation of ID graduates entered the workforce having to fend for themselves with no marketable hard skills and hard-to-explain soft skills. Imagine attending an interview with a Product Design firm armed with a threadbare portfolio of barely passable renderings and trying to justify that you are worth more than a polytechnic graduate who has kick-ass rendering technique just because you can ‘think’!
However, the great thing is that I really picked up on Design Thinking (my 6-month stint in TU Delft’s ID Studiolabs during student exchange helped tremendously) and made a difference to me as a marketer and it is something I strongly advocate at work.
I agree with Niti & Chris that even as an experiment, a lot of care and considerations are needed as you are ‘playing’ with the future of a generation of youths.
I have been Inddustrial engineer for the last 30 yrs. I worked in service industries.
What books or guides should I refer to?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Brij
Hi Tim,
I found your post as I was researching on East-West design perspectives for a colloquium I am participating in soon.
I am a lecturer at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore and teach “Cultural and Contextual Studies” at an undergraduate graphic design programme there. I also coordinate a Masters of Arts in Design programme at the same institution with a strong emphasis on research methods.
I have a design research background so naturally I try to inculcate a lot of design thinking and research skills to my Asian students throughout the programme. I believe that once you learn certain design research skills it becomes very difficult to avoid them in solving design problems and it has been my professional experience that design thinking works well and yields results. But convincing students is another story.
While students are interested in the design thinking process, they do not immediately see the value of these skills because of the “uncertainty” coefficient and because there is no immediate visual result that they can put in their portfolios. Moreso, students do not readily adopt the culture of experimentation given that it contains the risk of failure. There is a lot of emphasis on final results here while this idea of putting value in the process is, in my perception, something that still needs a lot of work, despite the big investments that Singapore is making in the creative industries.
I believe that education has a big role to play in terms of design thinking in Asia. Design schools, different than markets, can offer a ‘safe’ environment for healthy experimentation that is rewarded as such. Schools should prepare students with thinking and research skills they will need to face future challenges and the creation of new markets much beyond mere vocational training. This is the challenge in design schools across the world, I believe.
Hi, I am from India from an advertising/graphic design background.
I have 9 yrs of work exp.
I was interested in designing lifestyle products for home/office/ indoor / outdoor.
With concentration on luminaires.
Is there some short summer course which could help me go that extra step.
As I have formal education only in advertising/graphic design.
Waiting to hear from you.
Thanks
Hi Tim,
Love your inspirational talk on TED and the article you wrote for harvard business review. I am very much interested in design ethnography. Was just wondering if there are any short courses/ seminars or conferences that i could attend to give me a better insight into understanding it? It would be great if there are any in the Asian region. Looking forward to your reply.
Shar