design education don norman

The Future of Design Education

The Future of Design Education

The Future of Design Education

Many of you know that for a long time I have been partnering with IBM Design and The World Design Organization to rethink the curriculum for design. This is a progress report.

The History

It all started in March 2014 when Scott Klemmer and I wrote a paper called “State of Design: How Design Education Must Change” published in LinkedIn. (Why LinkedIn? Because of the wide, diverse readership: This paper has been read by 50,167 people, with 93 comments.)
Read the article here: https://bit.ly/31Qqv1W

Design Lab

When Scott, Jim Hollan, and I started the Design Lab, we knew what we did NOT wish to do: build a traditional design education. Our training was rich and varied, and we wanted our students to have a similarly broad education. We wanted to do things that made a real difference in the world. After all, our origin was from Cognitive Science and computers — Human Behavior and Technology, Design is an applied field that requires multi-disciplinary approaches to important, difficult issues.

The Meyer & Norman paper provided a structure

More recently, I was asked to contribute to a special issue of the new design journal, She Ji, on Design Education. I invited Michael Meyer to join me. The result was a paper called “Changing Design Education for the 21st Century,” where we suggested that Design can use the procedures that allowed other fields (e.g., medicine, law, and management) to restructure their education with special attention to the framework for a family of curricula devised by Computer Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.12.002

The Activity: Sponsorship and a Steering Committee

My colleague Karel Vredenburg at IBM Design thought this was so important that he offered IBM Design as a co-sponsor the multiple-year effort (which we believe will require over one hundred people. The World Design Organziationalso asked if they could join. We enlisted a Steering Committee of academics and practitioners with a rich variety of backgrounds and interests, people who have worked around the globe and are now across the United States, working in China, Sweden, the UK, and Switzerland.

We started in the BC years (Before COVID), which delayed our progress, but we are now announcing our presence. We have written a letter of invitation and we have a website https://www.FutureOfDesignEducation.org/.

The invitation letter and the names (and photos) of the Steering Committee can be found on the website.

To learn more about this project and the different levels of involvement, to volunteer yourself, and to propose other candidates, visit our website: https://www.FutureOfDesignEducation.org/.

– Don Norman, Director, UC San Diego Design Lab

Many of you know that for a long time I have been partnering with IBM Design and The World Design Organization to rethink the curriculum for design. This is a progress report.

The History

It all started in March 2014 when Scott Klemmer and I wrote a paper called “State of Design: How Design Education Must Change” published in LinkedIn. (Why LinkedIn? Because of the wide, diverse readership: This paper has been read by 50,167 people, with 93 comments.)
Read the article here: https://bit.ly/31Qqv1W

Design Lab

When Scott, Jim Hollan, and I started the Design Lab, we knew what we did NOT wish to do: build a traditional design education. Our training was rich and varied, and we wanted our students to have a similarly broad education. We wanted to do things that made a real difference in the world. After all, our origin was from Cognitive Science and computers — Human Behavior and Technology, Design is an applied field that requires multi-disciplinary approaches to important, difficult issues.

The Meyer & Norman paper provided a structure

More recently, I was asked to contribute to a special issue of the new design journal, She Ji, on Design Education. I invited Michael Meyer to join me. The result was a paper called “Changing Design Education for the 21st Century,” where we suggested that Design can use the procedures that allowed other fields (e.g., medicine, law, and management) to restructure their education with special attention to the framework for a family of curricula devised by Computer Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.12.002

The Activity: Sponsorship and a Steering Committee

My colleague Karel Vredenburg at IBM Design thought this was so important that he offered IBM Design as a co-sponsor the multiple-year effort (which we believe will require over one hundred people. The World Design Organziationalso asked if they could join. We enlisted a Steering Committee of academics and practitioners with a rich variety of backgrounds and interests, people who have worked around the globe and are now across the United States, working in China, Sweden, the UK, and Switzerland.

We started in the BC years (Before COVID), which delayed our progress, but we are now announcing our presence. We have written a letter of invitation and we have a website https://www.FutureOfDesignEducation.org/.

The invitation letter and the names (and photos) of the Steering Committee can be found on the website.

To learn more about this project and the different levels of involvement, to volunteer yourself, and to propose other candidates, visit our website: https://www.FutureOfDesignEducation.org/.

– Don Norman, Director, UC San Diego Design Lab

Many of you know that for a long time I have been partnering with IBM Design and The World Design Organization to rethink the curriculum for design. This is a progress report.

The History

It all started in March 2014 when Scott Klemmer and I wrote a paper called “State of Design: How Design Education Must Change” published in LinkedIn. (Why LinkedIn? Because of the wide, diverse readership: This paper has been read by 50,167 people, with 93 comments.)
Read the article here: https://bit.ly/31Qqv1W

Design Lab

When Scott, Jim Hollan, and I started the Design Lab, we knew what we did NOT wish to do: build a traditional design education. Our training was rich and varied, and we wanted our students to have a similarly broad education. We wanted to do things that made a real difference in the world. After all, our origin was from Cognitive Science and computers — Human Behavior and Technology, Design is an applied field that requires multi-disciplinary approaches to important, difficult issues.

The Meyer & Norman paper provided a structure

More recently, I was asked to contribute to a special issue of the new design journal, She Ji, on Design Education. I invited Michael Meyer to join me. The result was a paper called “Changing Design Education for the 21st Century,” where we suggested that Design can use the procedures that allowed other fields (e.g., medicine, law, and management) to restructure their education with special attention to the framework for a family of curricula devised by Computer Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.12.002

The Activity: Sponsorship and a Steering Committee

My colleague Karel Vredenburg at IBM Design thought this was so important that he offered IBM Design as a co-sponsor the multiple-year effort (which we believe will require over one hundred people. The World Design Organziationalso asked if they could join. We enlisted a Steering Committee of academics and practitioners with a rich variety of backgrounds and interests, people who have worked around the globe and are now across the United States, working in China, Sweden, the UK, and Switzerland.

We started in the BC years (Before COVID), which delayed our progress, but we are now announcing our presence. We have written a letter of invitation and we have a website https://www.FutureOfDesignEducation.org/.

The invitation letter and the names (and photos) of the Steering Committee can be found on the website.

To learn more about this project and the different levels of involvement, to volunteer yourself, and to propose other candidates, visit our website: https://www.FutureOfDesignEducation.org/.

– Don Norman, Director, UC San Diego Design Lab

Read Next

Sean Cross

Sean Kross explains the uses of The Wizard of Oz Technique in Design | Design Chats


Sean Kross, Graduate Student at UC San Diego, explains The Wizard of Oz Technique in design and what benefits it provides for designers.

Design Chats is a video series where we sit down with design practitioners to answer questions about how they utilize human-centered design.

View our Design Chats playlist on the Design Lab YouTube Channel
CHI 2019 Conference In Glasgow, Scotland

Design Lab Weaves the Threads of CHI 2019

From May 4-9, 2019, the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems took place in Glasgow, Scotland. Called “CHI” for short, this annual and prominent event brings together thousands of the world’s leading researchers, designers, and scientists in human-computer interaction. 

Design Lab members walked away with a number of awards for their research. Post-doctoral Fellow Sarah Fox won a Best Paper Award for “Managerial Visions: Stories of upgrading and maintaining the public restroom with IoT”.
Building New Bridges: San Diego And Tijuana’s Combined Bid Breaks Down Barriers To Bi-National Cooperation

Building New Bridges: San Diego and Tijuana’s Combined Bid Breaks Down Barriers to Bi-National Cooperation

As dusk hovered over The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park on October 3 at the ‘Welcome Home, Bienvenido a Casa’ event, reflections off the San Diego Bay illuminated an evening of excited anticipation more than five years in the making. Will the San Diego-Tijuana megaregion take home the win in their bid to be the 2024 World Design Capital? Or will it be their competitors, Moscow?

Hosting the event and spearheading the San Diego-Tijuana bid initiative is the interorganizational collaboration of Design Forward Alliance, UC San Diego Design Lab and the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, with the full support of the City of San Diego and City of Tijuana and regional elected officials. This collective was created to amplify San Diego’s capacity as a global leader in human-centered design-driven innovation. The combined communities of art, culture, business, education, civic and design worked together in a multi-year, multi-national collaboration culminating in this night of solidarity for the joint-effort to win the coveted World Design Capital designation—a year-long city promotion program that would begin in 2024 and put the region on the global stage as a world-class innovator of economic, social, cultural and environmental design solutions for a better society.

“It’s not just about gaining the World Design Capital title,” said the Director of The Design Lab, Mai Thi Nguyen. “It’s about how we actually want to contribute and collaborate on multidisciplinary design innovation throughout the region, nationally and globally.”
Grace Rieger

Grace Rieger on Designing for Healthcare | Design Chats


How might we use design to improve the efficiency of hospital operating rooms? Hear from Grace Rieger, Designer-in-Residence, as she talks us through one of her projects.

Design Chats is a video series where we sit down with design practitioners to answer questions about how they utilize human-centered design.

View our Design Chats playlist on the Design Lab YouTube Channel
Design Lab Michele Morris Forward

Why Does Design Matter: A Q&A With Design Forward Founder Michèle Morris

Michèle Morris currently serves as the Associate Director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego. She…

Bennett Peji

Meet Designer-in-Residence Bennett Peji

When Bennett Peji was asked to join The Design Lab as a Designer-in-Residence, he immediately said yes. “It was a natural fit,” he explains. “The Design Lab is composed of so many talented people, both in leadership and in its students, who have tremendous technical abilities, but also a big heart for using that expertise for the greater good.” Peji works with the Community team at The Design Lab, working on ways to define what it means for San Diego to be a global city. He is the Chief Innovation Officer at several businesses and Chairman of California Humanities. “Seeing us all collectively as being a very unique region in the world is one distinguishing factor in developing the opportunities that we have here. My role is to be a connector and a bridge builder to organizations who are like-minded. Like-minded in terms of seeing our region holistically and working for more ways to collaborate and create greater economic opportunities and access.”

Peji is a walking example of practicing what he preaches in order to present San Diego as a unique, diverse, global city. He emphasizes that it is not enough to just be welcoming. We must be truly inclusive. “The real work is to include and empower the folks who have never been to the table, who don't think and act and see the world the way we do, so that we can all have a more profound way of looking at the problems.” To do this, Peji has not been afraid to be the one swimming upstream. “We all have to find our way in this world called America and do the best we can. But since I’ve been on this journey for so long now, it has become so clear that it is not about assimilating [but instead] finding your own voice and expressing your own unique and distinct identity.”
Back To Top