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Designing the Ideal Industrial Design Program, by Paul Backett

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pixel_roller.jpgPixel Roller project from RCA graduates

This is the postscript of the 6-part series from Ziba's Industrial Design Director, Paul Backett, on rethinking design education. Read the Introduction to the series, Teach Less, Integrate More here

Bringing Industrial Design education in line with the needs of the profession will require raising standards across the globe. The majority of graduating students I've seen are ill-prepared for real world design practice and the responsibility for this lapse falls heavily on teachers and course administrators.

It's not enough to just put good designers in front of a classroom. The best schools create a culture of rigor and excellence that outlives the tenure of any one instructor. An established culture lets students know what's expected of them and pushes them to push each other beyond simply adequate to exceptional. Too many programs are missing that.

Yet here at Ziba, we still manage to find good graduates to hire. There are courses that get it half right and a handful that reliably produce designers that studios fight over. Perhaps the best way to improve design education is not to point out what's wrong but to highlight what's right.

What follows is a list of schools that I really respect. It's by no means exhaustive, but among the portfolios I've reviewed, classrooms I've visited and online work I've seen over the years, these are the courses I'd pick as examples for the global design education community to learn from.

Northumbria University - Newcastle, UK
The fraction of working British designers who studied at Northumbria is incredibly high (though I'm not among them). Apple's Jony Ive is the most famous, but it's a rare UK studio that doesn't have at least one graduate from this institution in the northeast of England.

What sets Northumbria apart is its rigor, in both research and technical execution. Students produce dense, thoughtful multipage documents that explain their target user, context and project goals in depth. These are followed up with beautifully realized designs that leave no detail to chance. Nobody graduates from Northumbria without an impeccable portfolio and flawless final presentation models that immerse the viewer in the product story.

Royal College of Art - London, UK
Some of the most inspiring and creative people I've ever met, graduates of the RCA have a unique capacity for thoughtful viewpoints that can be 180 degrees removed from everyone else in the room.

The RCA is renowned for pushing its students to tear down the design process and build it back from the ground up, so every project is a reinvention. And unlike many ID schools, it expects most students to produce fully working prototypes by course's end. I vividly remember seeing the "Magic Pixel Roller" in action at a student show a few years back and being truly astonished.

Umea Institute of Design - Umea, Sweden
A tiny ID-focused school seven hours north of Stockholm, Umea produces graduates with a great blend of artistry and technical skills, who manage to win at least one IDEA award nearly every year.

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