What Should We Be Thinking About When We Talk About "Training New Designers"?

Elena Pacenti taught for years at Domus Academy, the renowned Italian design school, and she has a few things to say.

China cares more and more about design. Companies are willing to invest in product development or hire internationally known designers to improve themselves. As individuals, we are coming to see that a good life depends on good design, so we pay more attention than before to well-designed products.

The education system must have noticed this boom, which is why universities of every kind, relevant or not, capable or not, have opened design programs. Yet for most people, what design education actually does, and how young designers ought to be trained, remain vague ideas.

QDaily interviewed Elena Pacenti, a designer and scholar who works mainly in service design and product design. Pacenti taught for years at Domus Academy, the renowned Italian design school, and in 2011 she founded its graduate program in service and experience design. She is now director of Domus Academy's San Diego campus in the United States.*

We talked with this seasoned design educator. You may come away with a new view of design education and of the design industry today.

Elena Pacenti

What makes design education special is that you learn design by doing it

Elena Pacenti believes that design, in the end, is about solving problems, and design education prepares students for the different problems of the future. As a designer, you have to imagine situations, objects and methods that did not exist before in order to solve problems.

An interior designer faces a space full of complex content and endless possibilities. A product designer has clients from every kind of industry (digital media, furniture companies, lifestyle companies). A fashion designer today may see beauty, and how to create it, quite differently from ten years ago. The things we face, the problems we need to solve and the tools we use are all changing, and no one can say with confidence what the future will look like.

Static knowledge is not enough. Students should learn more than technique, drawing and modeling. They need to face real problems and learn design through the process of designing, one project at a time. Their understanding of the industry is built up through these projects.

"If you don't actually have students design, you can't teach design well," Elena says.

She believes students can find ways to solve different problems only if they are placed in different real-world settings and given the chance to encounter the problems there.

So the most important thing in design education is to build a "problem context": simulate problems students may run into later, build them into design projects, and let students work on them. Ideally the context should be hard, "so that the students' first reaction is, 'Oh, she's asking me to design something when I have no idea what it even is.'"

Elena once had her students design a coworking space, a new kind of office that has been catching on in recent years.

The first step was to understand the nature of the problem: what coworking is. Together the students gathered examples from San Francisco, New York, Germany, Amsterdam, Italy and elsewhere to see how people around the world work side by side. Then, to design furniture, infrastructure and services suited to this particular office, they had to learn everything about the space: who the owner was, what kind of company it was, what its culture was like, and every other detail.

Along the way, they gradually learned to put themselves in the client's place and ask what was good, what was useful, and how people in the space would feel. In other words, they arrived naturally at thinking about the user's experience.

The Hong Kong office of advertising agency Leo Burnett

LinkedIn's Toronto office

Another project was to design storage space on a university campus. It was not an especially pressing problem; at least, few people felt anything needed fixing. But when the design students visited dormitories on several campuses, they found that many rooms lacked space for students' belongings. Outlets and plugs were everywhere, it was a mess, everything was jumbled together, and the storage really did need rethinking.

The students' survey found that dormitories on American campuses still have plenty of problems that need solving

"Designers need to observe and think about what people need. In fact, people don't really know what they want. Most of the time it's the designer who has to work it out."

Only when you learn to think from "understanding the problem" through to "solving the problem" can you really do design well.

Three things matter for running a good design program

1. Train the teachers and pass the school's educational philosophy on to them, since teachers sit at the very center of education.

Design students may not need to become researchers; their job is to solve problems hands-on. Teachers are different. Research is central to discovering problems: research into the problem itself, and surveys and studies of its setting. In the coworking project and the dormitory visits described above, the teachers had to understand the real-life conditions before the students did, and down to the last detail.

1. Teachers and students alike must be able to understand diverse cultures. Many cultures already exist side by side in our lives; that is simply today's reality. For design students who want to break out of fixed ways of thinking, understanding and sensing other cultures is very important. They are a rich source of inspiration.

Elena used to teach in Milan and has now moved to San Diego. Her faculty comes from many countries: Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, the United States and Thailand. When she first arrived and saw how international the team was, she was surprised.

"But I brought the Italian approach to design, and the others brought their own cultural traits and ways of thinking. So we can come at design through cultural diversity, and that's very important," Elena says.

In their curricula, many schools already do this by offering international exchange programs (for example, two years at home and two years abroad), so that future designers can see different worlds and understand how people from different cultural backgrounds view design and what they need.

1. The school must also keep good relations with industry.

One side of this is bringing industry people into the classroom. Elena sets up a real social context in class that simulates the complexity and difficulty of actual work and actual projects, which helps students grasp more quickly how the industry really operates.

"Isn't that interesting? The guests who come to your class are your future clients, the people who will pay you. You've already made connections with professionals and people in the industry. Smart students settle on a career direction quickly and find jobs as soon as they graduate."

The other side is that students must also go from the classroom into industry: visit companies in person, talk and work with their product designers, and watch and understand what those designers do day to day.

Take the product design course. California, where Domus Academy San Diego is based, has two main kinds of companies: technology companies and lifestyle companies (which sell lifestyle products such as quirky candy and surfing and skating gear). The two look like entirely different categories, but they are in fact related. California in particular has many tech startups, and they have to be creative ("cool") to stand out. If you design for these companies, the products you deliver need to show personality and more distinctive ideas.

Elena and her students once worked on a project for a speaker company. The brief they gave the students was "the future of sound": design the next generation of speakers. One student designed a speaker that combines visuals and sound. Another designed a speaker that sends sound in one specific direction. A cyclist, for example, could wear it while riding, and the speaker would beam sound to his ears, so he could listen as he rode without being distracted by other street noise.

A speaker with directional sound

When they designed furniture for a surf startup, they knew the company had a specific customer base: young people, many of them interested in surfing. So the small table they designed had an unusual shape, both ends curving slightly upward, light-looking, like a surfboard.

A table shaped like a surfboard

The design industry still loves beauty, and two new trends are hard to ignore

"I've always believed in the saying 'Beauty wins,'" she says, pointing to Apple. A big part of the reason Apple is so powerful today is that it has its own aesthetic system and has stuck with the design aesthetic of its products consistently.

Beyond timeless beauty, two new issues worth watching may be new business models, and cultural identity in a globalized world.

New business models have appeared in technology, the internet, communications, transportation and other industries, and they have changed the way people connect and communicate with one another.

Some of these business models introduce new ways of building trust. Uber and Airbnb are good examples. When they first appeared, users may have been very suspicious: getting into a stranger's car, we didn't know whether he was a professional driver; staying in a stranger's home instead of a hotel, we didn't know what might happen. But because people could see others' ratings and experiences, and could themselves rate unfriendly drivers and unreliable hosts, more and more of them chose to trust and gave it a try.

These new mechanisms show that trust between people regulates itself: both the side providing a service and the side receiving it can keep their own behavior in check.

An Airbnb treehouse in Spain

An Airbnb in Berlin, Germany, which looks a little worn but is actually rather elegant

The idea of a "sharing economy" has caught on too. As Elena puts it, people may now talk more about "sharing" than about consuming.

American cities, you could almost say, run on cars; everyone drives. But when the car-sharing service car2go took off, people found they had a new alternative to owning a car. The same goes for Milan, where Elena lived for many years. Milan now has even more varied sharing services, such as bike sharing. "Milan has no bike lanes at all, which sounds pretty crazy, but people are cycling more now," she says.

The second important new issue may be that we need to think about cultural identity in an international context.

Put simply, after seeing all kinds of cultures, designers must ask what we, as locals, can offer our own country, and how design can help us find and express our cultural identity (our cultural traits) in products, spaces, user experiences and so on.

Of course, where local tradition is very strong, people may in practice cling to rather outdated traditions. So how can they, in such a setting, keep a local awareness while bringing international design ideas, perspectives and methods into their work?

Elena's answer: you have to ask yourself what is ours, what is local.

Learning about the "international" is only the first step. Traveling the world to learn is how you find out how many things work and what standard international practice looks like.

Then, back home, you use this international way of thinking to discover local needs (which may never have been voiced but do exist), draw inspiration from local things, and propose solutions. In other words, you apply international thinking and new creations to local problems.

Hutong Bubble 32, designed for a Beijing hutong by Chinese architect Ma Yansong

This year, at a design conference at Tongji University, Elena met a Korean-American designer who now teaches fashion design in Singapore (someone, that is, who has seen and lived in different cultures firsthand). This designer asked her students to try to find some cultural character for the Asian fashion industry instead of simply following Europe, for instance by running strictly on the spring/summer and autumn/winter calendar. Singapore has no four seasons; winter clothes and summer clothes are about the same, and unlike in Milan, people have no use for those beautiful winter coats.

"If the existing fashion designs can't get girls to buy more new clothes, then we should design something that does make them want to spend. That's really great." This designer did not produce a new "design," but the idea she put forward was impressive.

Advice for Chinese designers? Take a broader view and, like the Italians, value beauty and value design

Elena Pacenti believes the new generation of Chinese designers should think more about what kind of future we want: not just be drawn to particular objects or products, but think about how we will get around, how we will socialize, and what else the future holds.

For example, they could apply design to big strategic problems. China's traffic problem is severe: there are so many private cars, and the subways and public transport are packed. Could we create a new way of getting around? Not just a "tool," but perhaps a whole "mode of transportation." Google and some carmakers have already developed or designed driverless cars, but there are not yet roads suited to them. This field has great potential, and it is closely tied to urban planning, not just a matter of carmakers developing their own next-generation products.

Google's driverless car

Elena is Italian, and she offered Chinese designers some advice from an Italian designer's point of view.

The first is to always keep a passion for detail and beauty. Italian culture is a hedonistic one that puts great weight on beauty and quality of life. As Italians see it, the quality of everyday goods, food and clothing, the craftsmanship that produces beautiful things, and a love of detail are all essential parts of "beauty" and "the good life."

The second applies more to companies. The success of "Made in Italy" comes down to a few factors working well together: visionary company owners and designers, the ability to produce the finest craftsmanship, and highly skilled technical staff.

"Design is a strategic asset for a company. It can change a company's fortunes and the way a business runs," Elena Pacenti concludes.

Image credits: Bean Buro, Office Snapshots, google, MAD, buzzfeed, New School of Architecture & Design, Laureate

Some images courtesy of Elena Pacenti.

*Note: Domus Academy San Diego is also part of the New School of Architecture & Design in the United States. Elena Pacenti is director of design at the New School of Architecture & Design and also director of the Domus Academy San Diego campus.