Navigating With and Without Direction
This article was published in the Winter 2022 Issue of IDSA’s INNOVATION Magazine.
Navigating with and without direction: nine new designers on their industrial design graduate program experience
Industrial design is an incredibly broad, diverse field. I’ve heard it described as a catchall category; everything that is not architecture, not interior design, not fashion design, not urban planning. Trying to get my head around what it might look like employment and career-wise does feel like pawing through a junk drawer at times. Some roles I recognize but I’m not sure what they are doing here. Some I don’t recognize and will have to figure out what they do later. Many are the essential roles for which we reach again and again.
Navigating to find one’s place in such a broad industry can be a challenge for the new designer, a challenge I am currently undertaking as a third year ID graduate student at Pratt Institute. Over two years in, understanding what roles are possible for me and the skills needed to excel in those roles is arcane knowledge I only begin to grasp. How that all adds up with my personality, passions, and philosophy as a designer to equal a well-suited job that contributes to a compelling career is a whole other issue.
How do others navigate finding their place in the field, and how does their education influence this? As I reflected on my own experience, I became curious about what drives other students. The voice of the student is rarely represented in accounts of the state of design education though they have powerful insider insights regarding the utility of their curricula. I solicited recommendations for survey participants from instructors and reached out to IDSA student merit award winners. I sent a short survey via e-mail and gathered thoughtful written responses from six active graduate students and three recent graduates. The nine participants represented five different industrial design programs in the U.S. Four men and five women participated. While the pool was small, the responses were rich.
What drove you to attend an industrial design graduate program?
There were five key reasons participants gave for attending an industrial design graduate program. While some referenced two or more of these reasons, all gave at least one.
Facilitating a career change
Leveraging existing skills sets in a new field
The versatility and openness of the field
Further exploring a compelling field
A love of sketching, crafting, and making
Four of the designers came to their program to transition from another field, three of them explicitly mentioning the appeal of ID as a discipline that would allow them to harness their existing expertise to move forward. Allen Chou (Arizona State University MID ‘24) saw ID as a discipline that could leverage his “research skills and creativity.” Charlotte Böhning (Pratt Institute MID ‘23) saw a rare discipline that could employ all of her diverse skill sets,
“I could see my skills in journalism (interviewing, researching, observing), economics (analysis, marketing, pricing), and art history (aesthetics, color, medium) coming in handy.”
Three designers mentioned their love of sketching, making, and crafting as contributing to the decision to attend a graduate ID program. Four designers mentioned the versatility and openness of the discipline as compelling factors. Ann Dinh (Rhode Island School of Design MID ‘22) explained, “the ID programs seemed like they would satisfy my insatiable curiosity.” Two designers with an undergraduate background in ID wanted to further explore the industry, to deepen their skills and knowledge. Ridima Jain (Pratt Institute MID ‘23) shared, “I decided to pursue a masters in Industrial Design to further expand my knowledge and get a global perspective on it!”
Did you know going into the program what area of design you wanted to focus on? If not, at what point were you able to determine that area of focus? What was the process of determining it?
My undergraduate degree is in English. Not coming from a background in ID, I did not know what an education in ID looked like or even could look like until I was in the middle of one. Comfortingly, I am not alone. Matt Quejada (Pratt Institute MID ‘24) came to ID with a background in engineering and explained, “I was open to learning anything since I felt I hadn’t earned that sense of direction yet.”
The group was split on the question of having a design focus before enrolling, with five designers clear on their direction and the other four undetermined. Those who knew seemed to me impressively specific in their focus, noting interests in medical design, transportation design, furniture design, and UX. Some of those who didn’t enroll with a traditional sub-genre of design in mind still had an admirable clarity about what they hoped to achieve with their education. Ridima knew that she wanted to “improve the quality of life for underserved communities worldwide” and Ann knew that she “wanted to focus on the intersectionality between digital and physical environments.”
Of the four designers who did not have a focus already, three of them still do not. More comforting still! While not committed to an explicit design focus, two had determined a thematic focus. Charlotte credited her cohort with the discovery, explaining, “I did not go into the program thinking I would be so passionate about waste management, circular products, and sustainability, but time spent with my peers heavily influenced this growing love.” Allen shared that he has realized that he is “more interested in the visual aspect of design where the priority of a project focuses more on the aesthetics.” In contrast, Matt described his process as one of “elimination,” sharing, “what’s really given me focus is taking time away from classes and doing some internal searching to reflect on what I’ve done in the past and how I might want to apply my skills to an actual area of design.”
Were you able to customize your curriculum to help you with that focus?
Four designers responded to the question of the customizability of their curricula with an unambiguous yes (Allen, Luo, Ridima, Ann), with both Ridima and Ann mentioning the appeal of being able to take courses outside the ID department. The other five designers essentially also answered yes, but with caveats and qualifications. Their answers were closer to basically kind of yes.
Here are some examples of that second flavor of yes:
“Although there is only one course about toy design, there is some flexibility on other courses’ projects that I can adopt aspects of design for play into those projects.” - Cathy He (Pratt Institute MID ‘23)
“Yes, the projects we worked on as graduate students were mostly open to interpretation.” - Maggie Jarrett (NC State University MID ‘22)
“To some extent - however, given that I do not have an undergraduate degree in ID, I had to slog through a number of introductory and prerequisite courses (that of course were incredibly valuable, but also limited the flexibility of my curriculum).” - Charlotte Böhning (Pratt Institute MID ‘23)
“Basically yes. At least I can participate in some elective courses.” - Hanyu Zhu (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign MFA ‘22)
“In a way, yes. I think there are plenty of options available to tailor your curriculum, especially if you’re proactive in understanding what you want to do.” - Matt Quejada (Pratt Institute MID ‘24)
The point made by Cathy and Maggie that the projects in an unrelated class might be tailored to a student’s focus is notable though not quite what I had in mind with this question. These answers made me wonder how empowered students feel to customize their curricula at all beyond taking a chosen elective in an available slot. Electives allow for exploration, but are they serving the desire for specialization?
Matt addressed the question more philosophically, explaining, “I think the meta-level question is this: does the curriculum itself guide students to know what they want out of the curriculum?” Though I have asked only a handful of designers at a handful of schools, the answer to Matt’s question from this research is: no.
Are you happy with your decision? Are you excited about a future in design?
Four designers answered this with an unreserved yes (Allen, Ridima, Maggie, Ann). Two answered yes “so far” (Luo, Hanyu). Three answered yes with the qualification that they are happy with their decisions despite some element of disappointment (Matt, Charlotte, Cathy). While ultimately happy with her decision, Charlotte explained, “design school has not been as collaborative as I would have hoped (most of our school projects and our theses are done in solitude).” Matt shared, “I really wish the nuances of the academic and professional environments were more accessible to people outside of it: things like what areas of design are emphasized in each area of the country (and world) or what schools’ particular take is on design.”
I resonate with this sense of going into an ID education relatively blind. It is difficult to know how I could have been any less blind, however, given how specialized the knowledge is, and how siloed it is within the industry itself. Decisions are made with imperfect knowledge every day, of course, but what efforts might the complex of ID education make to reduce the knowledge gap for incoming students, and to reduce it faster?
All of the designers were universally excited about their futures in design. Exclamation points abounded here. Three look forward to the role design will play in technological advancements and interfaces (Allen, Hanyu, Ann). Some made an interesting distinction between their personal futures in design and the future of design itself. Charlotte noted that “we need to overcome this divide between the old guard and new guard, those who are deeply attached to traditional ID education and those who place an equal emphasis on design research and interdisciplinary innovation.” Ann acknowledged “systemic issues with diversity within the profession” but was “optimistic that we can acknowledge the problems and make actionable steps to improve.”
Conclusion
When discussing his program’s curriculum Matt added, “There needs to be more emphasis on understanding who we are as designers, rather than what we design.” He continued, “I spent the last two years thinking I could conjure up my unique perspective and practice by wrestling with a curriculum, but in the last three months I’ve experienced so much more growth simply by reaching out to professionals in the field.” Given that the vast majority of ID students will go on to non-theoretical work, a focus on concrete professional work exposure seems highly logical. To what extent is this built into design education? To what extent could it be emphasized?
While the rare industrial design student asks herself both ‘Who am I as a designer?’ and, in tandem, ‘What do I want to design?’, the designers I surveyed identified as being predominantly on one journey or the other in their design education. Those who entered ID with a clear direction were more likely to be on the ‘What do I want to design?’ path, and those who entered with no precise direction were more likely to be on the ‘Who am I as a designer?’ path. To become the kind of agile, versatile designer that so much of the ID job market calls for, engaging in a rich, complex dialogue with both of these paths seems critical. I find the latter ‘Who’ path to be more powerful as a north star for one’s design identity (but perhaps that is because I am one of them). I appreciated Ridima’s comment that determining an area of focus “seems counter intuitive to the nature of Industrial Design as a profession.”
That the students who didn’t already have a focus had largely not developed one is intriguing. Each gave a creative, alternative answer to the question, suggesting that they do in fact have a focus, a direction, but not one that aligns with the official options. Does this reluctance to select a specific design sub-genre suggest that they are better suited to taking a broad, overarching view? If so, how might a curriculum support this absence of focus just as powerfully as it supports a focus? How might these students understand what their place in the industry could be? It is not necessary to limit oneself to any object or service category in the field of industrial design—as so many of the iconic design heroes demonstrate—but it does seem useful to at least approximate the focus mindset when job hunting.
So, yes, I admit, I do not know what half of the stuff in this fantastically miscellaneous industrial design drawer is. It is not yet clear how much I need to know. I am ready to trust the learning process although I wonder if design education could do more to earn that trust. In many frustrating moments I remember being certain that some confusion could have been avoided, though I could not myself see how. I will find my way, of course, as we all do. I write from the critical stance of love. Vague as my plan is, I resonate with Cathy’s sentiments about a future in design: “I cannot be more excited to pursue a career in design. It feels like I have found my calling.”