The challenge and particularly for people who came up as designers, came up as graphic designers, maybe people who are a little bit older; is that the technology that’s required to create things in the modern world is so much more complicated. In the past if you had a good eye, if you had a good sense of art, if you were good in art classes basically growing up; if you had those things then you learned some principles and practices around typography around layout. You were well armed to be a really successful “designer” and designing the whole wide range of things that people in the position of a graphic designer, but really what was just called a designer would have and would be.

The complexity compared to even 10, 15 years ago today is remarkably more. It’s now common place where we understand and take for granted that to be a be a great designer, to be the best designer and certainly the most valuable and most marketable designer you need to be able to code to some degree. To manifest your designs, bring them to life. Make them kinetic as opposed to static and that’s hard enough.

A lot of people who traditionally were cut out to be good designers don’t necessarily have either the natural skills or interests that lend themselves to being exceptional on the other side of the fence. Some do, some don’t, some people work really hard for it, other people don’t feel like it. It’s certainly obtainable, but it’s a whole other set of skills.

Stepping back, for awhile now we’re been aware of other aspects of the creationary process that don’t come from that graphic design background. But have to do with information organization or information architecture, things around interaction design. Instead of the focusing on an artifact, focusing on an interaction or even a broader sphere or system of behavior.

However, for designers who in the classic mold of the auteur want to do it all, want to take something from the first concept all the way through implementation. Now they need to not just have the design, graphic design aspects and have the code aspects, they’re increasingly important there; but also the ability for information organization, which is again a different set of skills to really create in that context.

Stepping back even further to take it all from soup to nuts, there’s the research aspect. There’s the strategy aspect. There are also things that are most crosscut layers, such as the communication aspect both during and after the design process.

Again, the solution that a lot of people and companies have taken is to slice that across many different participants. It’s more of like an assembly line. Person “A” is good at these things, hands off to person “B” to “C” to “D” to “E”. That’s one way to skin the cat. At the end of the day, as with anything in creation and as we’ve seen again and again and again in business, frankly, the most successful organizations, the most successful creations come from one consistent vision.

It’s not the design by committee that we all love to scorn. It’s about somebody really seeing it and being able to orchestrate and make that happen. For someone who is doing that as the designer, as the creator; as opposed to someone who’s taking orders, Steve Jobs would be the iconic example of the guy who has the vision and gives the orders to people who make it happen. If you’re on the creationary side of that and wanting to be the visionary and drive that through from soup to nuts, the complexity is pretty astounding.

That’s not even getting into the fact of the complexity of the ecosystem in which the things we create live in. I’ve been talking about how the different skills required to create from start to finish have become really exponentially more complicated, more integrated and more pieces and parts.

On the other side of it, the ecosystem in which the things we create live are more complicated. The degree to which you need to understand different contexts of culture, different aspect of technology, the way the lifestyle works. I’ve put the last five, four years of my life into researching psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. I didn’t do that to be a better designer. That’s wasn’t my goal, but for someone who wants to be the best possible designer, that’s part of the skill set as well.

Now look at all these things that we’re talking about. I’ve probably ticked off a dozen different things. They take different types of thinking. They take different types of problem solving. It’s really become this incredibly complex landscape to be the designer. To be the person who is the creator who can take something from the beginning to the end and lead that whole process. Very few certainly can do that. Given all the things that would be required, probably a lot of people don’t even want to do that.

At the extreme, what I would consider the apex predator of designers, that’s what’s required. It’s all of those skills, it’s the ability to… it’s taking the time to learn about all of these vastly, vastly different things. Then having the skill to incorporate and apply them in the right and different ways. I’m not talking about this to scare anyone away. Certainly from being a designer, I don’t think at least at this point, all of these things are required. But more and more of them are becoming expected if not required.

Going back to the code example, the most simple one early on, there are a lot of design positions now for which if you don’t know how to code at all, if you are a throw it over the wall designer who wants someone else to code it; you’ve not going to be able to get that job. The baseline requirement is that you are able to make it work.

Sometimes that’s because they want someone who is able to make it work on the interface layer. Or it’s because your ability to make it work or not is a reflection of the knowledge you have or don’t have regarding what can be created, what’s possible to be created in the current technological constraints. If you’re not in the code and understanding that there’s no way in hell you can keep up with that.

I’m sure that many of you have seen other requirements around designers. Again, in more limited ways but different slices of what I’ve talked about. Someone who can do graphics as well as interaction as well as information is a common one. Someone who has a background in and not necessarily educational but an applied background in research is a critical one. Good communication skills; both from the context of normal communication with the team, IPCO (inter-personal communication).

Also the ability to design communications that make the things, the process of the things you’re creating goes more smoothly; and to communicate out after the fact in different ways as well, getting into service and sales even in some cases.

A lot of times, big companies they’re going to slice all these things up into a bazillion things and that can work, even though I think it generally works less well. That’s something that’s more honed. But for all of us who are creators we need to be aware of the changing expectations. That each year that goes by more and more is going to be required of us in terms of the knowledge we have, in terms of the skills we’ve developed and in terms of what can create in an increasingly complex world of increasingly complex things.

Something to think about hopefully not get depressed by, but maybe energized by. I know for me, what drives me as the creator is the process of learning. The cliché is if you’re not learning you’re dying. Even though I’m not literally dying, when I’m not learning I’m dying a little bit inside. I’m energized by learning more, to create better and I hope you are too. Thanks and talk to you next time.

They go off and they just say look, we’re going to create this thing. They create this curriculum that’s all about the things that they think people need and then they divide up the curriculum keeping the really fun stuff for themselves and hiring a bunch of adjunct professors for the stuff that they don’t want to have to teach the basics. Then they start this school and they advertise it and because everybody knows who they are they get a lot of people to sign up and it works really well, but they don’t think about who the customer of the school is in terms of the graduates that come out. They think of the customer as the students because in essence that they are, they’re the ones paying for the program.

When Leslie and I started we both came from a different place. I was coming out of this world where I was dealing with our corporate clients who were telling me that they’re just not getting what they need in terms of designers, designers are getting harder and harder to hire in general and designers out of school just weren’t meeting the needs that they were looking for. Leslie who had just spent years getting her E.D.D. which is the education equivalent of a PhD in teaching web design, she was frustrated that the standard approach to design hasn’t changed in 20 or 30 years and that it didn’t seem to be fitting what she was seeing her students needing as they were coming out of … she was at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and that the students weren’t … she was having to go beyond the curriculum she was given to actually produce students who would meet the needs of the companies that were trying to hire them.

We decided to sit down and tackle the problem in a radically different way than programs are typically tackled, which is we decided to go to the hiring companies first and say what is it that you need from people you’re hiring, what do you want? We decided to focus in on the specific of a title called user experienced designer, which is this generalist approach to design. One of the things that we found was that the companies were very hungry for this. With only a few exceptions everybody was ready to have designers, they really wanted generalist designers to come on. They felt very restricted by having everything siloed.

The information architects were one type of designer and visual designers were another type of designer and interaction designers were yet another type of designer and that people could only do one thing and they were stuck in those roles. We started by looking at and asking the question how would you start to create programs that were generalist designers, generalist experienced designers? That in itself proved to be an interesting challenge and guided the way that we approached everything. What we realized is at the core we have to have a curriculum that teaches folks to really be able to tackle all of the elements of design.

We’ve divided experience design up into eight categories and those are interaction design, information architecture, visual design. Copywriting we think is an essential skill of an experienced designer, being able to both write microcopy such as the stuff you’d put around a button or at the top of a form, or being able to write persuasive copy to get someone to choose an option or understand it quick or understand what goes behind what’s this link that’s next to a sophisticated option, so copywriting is key. User research is a critical component of this. We think that information design is very critical, information design which includes things like data visualization and being able to represent data very well.

Even just presenting, if you’re Dropbox, presenting a list of files and indicating what’s shared and what isn’t and things like that, that’s a key component of this. Design process management, being able to deal with the fact that we have to iterate fast and we have to work very quickly and a component that we call curation and editing which in essence is understanding how to say no to elements of the design that might show up. Being able to say no, that’s not what we want or that’s not good enough or that’s going to make things too complex and to be able to keep a razor of simplicity around. That’s the eight categories that we think are the core of experience design and the curriculum that we’re thinking of is one that focuses on those eight categories.

We decided early on that we didn’t want to actually work in that space, that we don’t need to do that. We need to produce all the people who are going to work for those people, who are going to actually do the design work. They don’t necessarily need to be five-year visionaries, they don’t need to be futurists, but they do need to be able to adapt to new things really fast. There’s a difference between being able to look into the future and say oh, my gosh, speech recognition is on the horizon, we need to get our groove up on understanding how we’re going to interact with speech and being at that forefront.

We’re not going to spend that much time playing in that space with our students. Instead our students are going to focus on what are the things that are now available. So now we have the toolkit that has an API that let’s us do telephonics and phone stuff and some speech detects and some speech recognition. Okay, given that toolkit, how do we play with this, what could we do with it, what is it that we could build into the application? It’s a today thing, it’s very much a today thing. It’s not five years coming down the road we need to do this.

If companies need that and companies do need that, I agree with you on that, they can get those resources from someone else. At some point, whenever you’re designing something you have to say what you are and what you’re not. We decided very early on that we were not going to produce these visionary designers for the future, we were going to create all the people who were going to work for them to execute today and produce a group of makers and executers who can really finish the project and get it fit and not be just in the mode of playing with the toys of the future. Does that make sense?

What was interesting was that it wasn’t that stuff either. What it was was they came back and the hiring managers were all consistent, we talked to, I don’t know, about 60 of them and at major organizations like the New York Times and G.E. and J.P. Morgan Chase and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and all these different folks. Even though we were in all these different industries, we were across non-profits and government and commercial and we got a very consistent answer across all these hiring managers and it basically was five things.

They told us that the best designers are storytellers, that they can talk about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and what’s driving what’s going on in a way that people just sit up and listen and go yes, I get it, that’s what I want to be part of and that storytelling was an essential part of their design skills. They told us that the best designers were amazing at critique. They were amazing at receiving critique and being able to take it in and one of the phrases that kept coming up was that these people were passionate about design, but just passionate about their own designs. They were also amazing at giving critique, at being able to say to somebody that’s really good, but I think we could do better and really bringing them in. The thing that was most amazing, that they thought was really the best skill was taking people who had not been in a solid critique process before and bringing them into the process and having them be able to give constructive, affirmative critiques that makes things better.

Another skill that they told us separated everybody from the rest or separated the best from the rest was sketching, being able to take an idea and render it in a form that other people look at and go, I completely get where you’re coming from. Yeah, that’s not quite going to work for us because of this, this, and this thing that I couldn’t explain before, but now that I see this I can or that’s going to work perfect, right. Being able to render that, whether it’s on a whiteboard or the back of a napkin or using a tool like Actor or in HTML or working in a browser or whatever the platform is, being able to sketch an idea out quickly such that everybody can see it. They told us that that the best folks can present, they can stand in front of a group and they can get their ideas out and they can share where they’re at and they can really communicate effectively, whether it’s in front of peers or stakeholders or even users and clients.

Finally, they told us that the best designers could facilitate, they could take a group of people in the room and they could pull out of those folks the requirements and the needs and the constraints and the context that the design has to happen in a way that you wouldn’t get if you just said okay, everybody write down all the context we have to work in today. Be able to actually do activities and run meetings and do game storming stuff and bring that stuff out. We think that that’s a core piece of the curriculum that has to be there and it’s going to have to be reinforced throughout the period of learning, so that when the students come out of the school they are completely skilled in storytelling, critique, sketching, presenting and facilitating.

What we’re thinking is while that macro is interesting, being able to look at the micro and then look at what the micro … what’s happening at the edges of the micro because in essence experience design is about activities, right, using your camera, offloading the pictures onto the machine, uploading them onto the net, sharing the pictures, right. We’ve got four distinct activities, maybe five we conclude commenting on the pictures and discussing them, right. You’ve got five activities, but then you’ve got the experiences that happen between those activities, so now you can start to draw that journey map of what actually happens between all of those things.

You have to get the activities right, you have to be able to do those well, but then you have to be able to look at the connections between those activities and say where do the experiences go up and down and what’s happening. The thing is that if you can’t focus on the activities it’s very hard to focus on the space between the activities, so you have to bring this in piece by piece by piece. It would be wonderful to say that we could create an educational institution that would produce students who come in, look at problems, instantly know how to solve world peace by changing this one registration form and make the world better that way.

At some point, you’ve got to sit back and say okay, what’s more important? Being able to see world peace, but not being able to actually make a usable registration form, or being able to make a usable registration form and work towards world peace in the long-term one little chunk at a time. What we were hearing in the research was that people were very frustrated by having folks who were actually coming out of schools, who were big thinkers, but not able to do the small things. They were not able to just produce a bunch of comps or get a working prototype or just create a form that was easy to use because the school focused on big systems thinking problems, design thinking, that big sort of let’s just tackle all the world, let’s reinvent the world.

Part of the problem is that a lot of schools today just focus on the design piece of the problem. They look at … the homework assignments they give are come up with a new design that’s going to help some disadvantaged group, right, that’s the assignment they get. Suddenly, we’re seeing these projects and I’ve seen a lot of these design projects that are things like a sustainable alarm clock for the homeless. What do we need a sustainable alarm clock for the homeless for? Well, homeless people need to get up for something, I guess, and the materials should be recycled and sustainable. They’re like okay, that’s great, but how does that help a Wells Fargo bank, to make sure that online banking isn’t such a disaster?

We decided to focus on that piece of the puzzle and say okay, we want folks who can seriously design a form and do a great job on a form and make the interactions on that form make sense or give the copy on the form perfect, but we also want them to be able to build a form. They need to understand how an MBC model works because if they have a model view and controller they need to understand that they’re in charge of the view and that that’s what the designer does, but they can only change the view based on what the controllers give them. The controllers are all based on how the model works and so they have to understand enough about the model to be able to communicate with the Dev Team to be able to actually say hey, can we change the model to work this way? No, we can’t, okay, can you give me a controller that does this, this, and this? Okay, you give me a controller that does two of those things, fine, I’m going to make the view based on that, right.

The curriculum that we’re looking at is very much one that is long-term, so it’s this two-year program and one of the pieces of the two-year program is that we’re leaving the last six months of the program undefined until it’s really uncomfortable for us as the people running the program to leave it undefined. The idea of leaving it undefined is that we want to have the companies that are going to hire these students to help us define what that should be, so somewhere around the 12-month part we would go to them and say okay, what are the big things that you need that are coming down the pike?

This is a big change from existing educational institutions. If you’re an accredited program one of the problems is is it takes three years to get a curriculum change pushed through accreditation. Three years in our field is a huge amount of time. There are no accredited programs today that are teaching responsive design because responsive design is within the three-year window. If anybody’s teaching responsive design they’re doing it outside their accreditation. We realized early on that we can’t go down the accreditation route and it turned out that when we worked with the hiring managers on this, it turns out they could care less about whether the programs that students are graduating from are accredited, they just want them to have the skills.

If we can demonstrate that they have the skills that they need, then they’ll push aside the notion that the program has to be accredited and they’ll accept it that way. We decided that that’s the way we’re going to do it, so we’re going to let the hiring companies help us define things like responsive design or whatever the newest thing is. If we start a program the summer of 2014 let’s say, then the spring of 2016 is going to be undefined for quite a long time. At the end of 2015 we will go to the hiring companies and say what is it you really need now that you’re not getting and we will put together a program in that six months that will cover those materials.

That’s one key piece, but the other key piece is that we’re going to focus on the skill of learning. Today you have to be a lifelong learner, you have to constantly be able to use resources and frankly it’s the easiest now it’s ever been. You can go online and you can go to the Google and you can type in a key word and you can find anything you need. You need to learn a new programming language, it’s there. There are interactive tools, there’s now Treehouse and Udemy and all sorts of things that will teach you a new programming language. If you need to learn a new library for like a jQuery type thing, you can go out and learn that pretty fast. You can get code examples, you can download GitHub libraries.

We’re going to focus on constantly giving the students things they have to learn to focus them on the skills of learning and say okay, here’s something brand new, how are you going to teach yourself that? Here’s something else brand new, how are you going to teach yourself that? The basic tools and things, they’re going to have to learn how to teach themselves and that will be a key part of the curriculum. Between that and keeping the curriculum open we now have a way to make sure that the students come out of the program ready to work with the latest skills and technologies and can adapt to new technologies as they come down the pike.