You guys have been amazing. We asked for $21,700 to design the curriculum for Center Centre and you came through big time.

We had always planned to have stretch goals if we met our initial goal. We just thought we’d have more than 3 hours to figure out what they could be. Thanks to you, we’re proud and excited to announce our first stretch goal (earlier than we could have ever hoped!).

Stretch Goal #1: Bring On The School’s Faculty

If we reach $112,000, we can bring on Center Centre’s full-time faculty several months ahead of schedule. We call our full-time faculty facilitators (though they’ve already earned the nickname of unicorn wranglers). We can also start identifying and scheduling the industry experts who will start every course with a two-day workshop diving deep into their topic.

Our original Kickstarter project goal was to design 30 courses. But designing a course and delivering it are two very different things. By bringing on the facilitators early and signing up the industry experts, we can train everyone to deliver the courses the way we’ve designed them. Change the future of UX education with a significant boost for Center Centre’s faculty hiring. Pledge today.

Read on if you want the nitty gritty of how this $112,000 stretch goal will make Center Centre even more awesome…

Facilitators and Industry Experts: A Different Approach To Skills Training

First, a little insight into our thinking. The Unicorn Institute research project taught us we need to take a different approach to course delivery. While many other schools rely on full-time faculty to master the material and be great instructors, we’ll divide the job in an unconventional, collaborative way.

At Center Centre, we’ll have full-time facilitators who are great instructors and coaches, each with solid subject matter experience. We’ll augment the facilitators with a team of industry experts who can dive deeply into the material (often because they wrote THE book on their topic) and who are also proven teachers.

Our first cohort will have 36 students and three full-time facilitators. The ratio of one facilitator to every twelve students means that the students will get a rare level of individual developmental attention. The facilitators will act as coach, mentor, and team leader to the teams under their care.

For every one of the 30 courses, we will recruit a different industry expert. The facilitators, who will know the students the best, will work closely with the industry experts to tailor their material to each student’s capabilities.

The teaming of industry experts with facilitators ensures each student gets personalized instruction and the latest state-of-the-art thinking. Leslie’s expertise in designing curriculum and teaching design, combined with Jared’s experience delivering cutting-edge UX concepts through world-class educational conferences will ensure we get the right blend of expertise and instructional finesse.

How The Stretch Goal Works

Having facilitators and industry experts was always in the plan. Yet, we hadn’t planned on using the Kickstarter money for it. Like any ongoing school, the money from tuition pays the facilitators’ salaries, benefits, and relocation costs and the industry experts’ fees and expenses.

But because of your generosity and the the pledges that are still coming in, we can now bring the facilitators on earlier. We’ll use the additional money to cover their relocation costs and the extra few months of salary and benefits, until the tuition funds start coming in.

These extra few months will be critical to the school’s development. With this additional time, the facilitators will work with Leslie to develop the curriculum (saving us the cost of our planned contract writers). This means the facilitators will deliver the courses better, because they were involved in the design and development.

With the facilitators onboard earlier, we can start the work with the industry experts sooner. That extra time will bring extra quality to each course. This will make better designers out of our students. And better designers means a world of better UX.

Bonus: Opening the School in the Fall

When we launched the Kickstarter we thought opening in the fall of 2014 would be challenging—maybe even impossible. After all, designing 30 courses is just one small (but significant) step to open our doors.

However, by meeting this $112,000 stretch goal and bringing on the facilitators months earlier than planned, we’ll have enough team resources to make the impossible become possible. In addition to the course development, the new staff can help interview prospective students, work through the admissions process, and set up our classroom and project space.

You got us to our original goal in 3 hours. That was amazing.

Now we’re asking for something even more amazing. Help us bring the faculty on earlier to create a better educational experience. Change the future of UX education by boosting our faculty hiring. Pledge today.

We’re taking what we’ve learned through the Unicorn Institute and making a school called Center Centre! We’ve already created the structure for the school. Now, it’s time to build the course content.

We’re doing a Kickstarter and calling the project The Unicorn Institute, Courses to shape the future of UX design. We’re designing thirty courses in seven months. That’s thirty courses focused on UX topics. These courses will cover a wide range of topics—everything from interaction design to facilitating. Creating learning goals, assessments, learning activities, and resources for 30 courses is a ton of work. We need your help to fund our work to create course content to shape the future of UX.

Why do a Kickstarter?

When we talked with hiring managers and leaders about industry needs, we were overwhelmed by the significant need for well-trained UX designers. The immediate question was, “How can I help make a school happen?”

Building a bricks-and-mortar school from the ground up is a rather extensive undertaking. We could have taken a less expensive route by creating a program within an existing school. But, our research showed that many traditional academic environments don’t allow the necessary structure to produce graduates ready for professional environments. This meant for us to be able to create a learning environment that prepared students for meaningful jobs, we needed to start from scratch. But we all know a school is far from just bricks and mortar. The content taught within the walls makes it a school. And now you can help “build” it.

We’ve created this Kickstarter project as a way for people to get involved with the school (before it’s even officially a school!) so—together—we all have a hand in building the future of UX.

Why only $21,700?

Yes, it’s true, starting an entire school costs much more money than our Kickstarter goal. The funds raised from this Kickstarter project will focus specifically on the course design process. Contributions will directly allow us to afford editors and writers to join our course creation team and assist us in writing curriculum. The project, as a whole, will assist in pinpointing course content to meet both industry and student needs.

How do I get involved?

Here’s your chance to help change the future of UX education and the future of UX. We’re excited about this huge undertaking. We would love your support!

Visit our Kickstarter project, make a pledge, and ask the world #AreYouIn?

Join us on the next step of the Quest!

UX design generalists, AKA unicorns, might seem like mythical, magical creatures in a faraway land, but they are among us every day. Maybe, you have a unicorn on one of your team projects. Really, you could be working with a unicorn right now. Heck, you might even be a unicorn.

We’re creating a learning environment that will be a great fit for people who are ready to move into UX design and become full-on unicorns. Once we receive state authorization and start enrollment, we’ll be searching for potential students ready for change and hungry to learn new skills—skills that will send them off into exciting new career experiences (and maybe even faraway places)!

The unicorns at our school will be a diverse group of learners with varied backgrounds and qualifications. This diversity will help create a rich learning experience. Our unicorns could be as young as 18; however, we are looking for mature students who are prepared to work hard and ready to take their careers to new heights.

We expect unicorns to primarily be:

• Current design professionals trapped by the UX glass wall
• Career shifters
• Designers/geeks right out of high school or college

Current design professionals trapped by the UX glass wall

This group of potential unicorns may serve in design roles such as graphic design, information architecture, or user research. But interesting assignments and new opportunities are limited and have prevented these folks from gaining necessary experience to find a new job with complex and exciting challenges. To help meet the needs of people trapped by the UX glass wall, we’re creating a program that will allow students to expand their skill sets and gain practical experience from a wider breadth of projects.

Career shifters

The field of UX design is frequently cited by the mainstream press as one of the top growing fields in which to land a job. We expect many individuals who are in lower-paying jobs with little growth potential—career shifters—to look to this career path as a desirable change.

Other career shifters have been out of the workforce for some time, maybe taking a lengthy personal or family leave. Because of the rapid and dramatic change in technology, reentering the workforce can be tough. Our school will provide the opportunity to learn the latest methods and tackle today’s toughest design problems.

Designers/geeks right out of high school or college

This group of mature 18- to 24-year-olds has been passionate about design since their teenage years. Mostly self-taught, these folks have an intense passion for design and know UX is the right career choice. They are interested in a well-rounded education and securing the necessary soft skills to succeed on a high-producing design team.

Two weeks ago, we spent a week filming videos for our soon-to-be less-than-top-secret project. This project will help take the Unicorn Institute from a research project to an actual school.

Yes, we’re making a real, bricks-and-mortar school!

If you have eagle eyes that allow you to read the teleprompter (that’s amazing, and we’re totally jealous), you may notice that we’ll be sharing concrete details about our plans for the school’s structure. No matter what you can see, we thought you might want a sneak peak of the answer to the question:

How will we structure our school’s courses?

Unlike traditional educational environments, where students divide their attention and time between four or five courses spread out over three months, our students will only take one course at a time for three weeks. And their school day will be the length of a regular workday.

Our students will attend class five days a week for eight hours a day. This means they focus on new material and learn how to sustain the energy needed in a professional environment.

Our courses will be broken up into three parts: two day industry-grade workshops from guest industry-experts, three days focused on individual mastery projects, and ten days working on small-team projects. These team projects will span over multiple courses and will last three to five months.

From our research, we know structure affects learning. With this knowledge, we’re creating a school that empowers students to become the UX designers companies want to hire.

This is just a little look into our plans to make a school that creates industry-ready UX designers. Over the next few weeks, we’ll delve deep into the nuts and bolts of the school. Follow us on Twitter and on our blog to learn how we’re taking our research and turning it into a UX design school.

Design matters. And it doesn’t just matter to designers.

CEOs, CxOs, Vice Presidents, and the rest of the folks in the C-Suite sit around conference tables with their iPads, wondering why their company’s products aren’t as delightful to use as their competitors’.

These folks are beginning to understand that design is a differentiator and a necessity. Design is a necessity for their business not only to survive, but to thrive.

However, they may not understand how to make design happen. They may even believe that it’s some type of magic or secret sauce. They do know that design matters and that they need designers to make their companies, organizations, and products relevant. Executives in the C-Suite realize that design is life for their companies, and so their companies’ lives need to be centered in design.

Hiring managers know that design plays, and will continue to play, a critical role in the success of their companies because: What has been seen cannot be unseen.

And what has been seen is companies like Apple, which are investing a lot of resources in design. We can see how much design matters by looking at Apple’s profits in comparison with their competition.

This understanding is leading to an increased demand for designers, and even more specifically it’s leading to an increase in demand for user experience designers. In fact, in the United States alone, there are around 150,000 job listings in the user experience (UX) field.

That’s a tremendous number. And it’s growing because the understanding that design is critical to business is growing. New design graduates are not prepared for these jobs.

And keeping unfilled positions open isn’t practical. It is an unacceptable solution for companies. If you’re in a large company and have the resources to do so, you can create an internal school to create your own designers.

IBM is planning to hire 500+ UX folks in the next five years. IBM knows they have no other option but to hire people who may not have the complete skill set they need to do well within the company. So, IBM made their own internal school, a six-month program that’s a bit like designer boot camp.

This kind of program is necessary because it’s challenging to find people with the holistic skill set needed to perform well in our industry.

Companies know that designers and developers—UX folks—are part of their business solution. The bottom line is: experience sells. But these companies struggle to find talent with the right type of experience to craft the right type of experience for their customers. So they resort to expending a lot of resources to recruit and train a team.

We get these questions from hiring managers. What happens if you don’t want to bring education in-house? What happens if you don’t have endless resources? Where do you find the talent you need?

Welcome to Unicornicopia. The land of the generalists. This is the land where UX designers survive and thrive in our industry

Every hiring manager we interviewed said they need UX designers to have a holistic skill set. Designers need to be proficient in hard skills like:

• Front-End Development: Coding valid HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery
• Visual Design: Understanding the use of color, grid, layout, and typography
• Mobile Integration: Creating consistent experiences through responsive layouts, touch interactions, and input techniques
• Project Management: Incorporating iterative design, agile practices, and software development life cycles
• Information Architecture: Planning experiences through site mapping, modelling, and wireframes
• Interaction Design: Building flow, form design, micro-interactions, and transition animations
• Copywriting and Content Strategy: Writing microcopy, content modelling, and content inventories
• User Research: Conducting field research, usability studies, research synthesis, and data analysis

Hiring managers also need UX designers to have mastery of soft skills like:

• Presenting: Sharing thoughts and design concepts with peers and stakeholders
• Facilitating: Extracting design requirements and project direction from peers and stakeholders, while promoting a shared understanding
• Critiquing: Receiving, giving, and training peers and stakeholders on constructive feedback
• Storytelling: Communicating and affirming to peers and stakeholders how decisions were made, how principles were arrived at, and how the design will improve the lives of the users
• Sketching: Communicating emerging design ideas quickly and exploring problem space with peers and stakeholders
• Leadership: Providing vision, direction, and passion to peers and stakeholders

Companies need teams of generalists. A generalist (aka Unicorn) is someone who has equal expertise in most, or hopefully all, of these areas.

The good news: Hiring managers don’t always need UX designers to do everything at the same time. And even though UX designers are generalists, each UX designers can be slightly different shape and mold of a generalist. An effective design team will include UX designers who have different strengths and passions but each UX designer will have some proficiency in all hard and soft skills.

Culturally, the celebration of the lone genius myth prevails. The lone genius is the person who works as a single individual to achieve greatness. It sort of makes sense that traditional educational organizations often focus on individual learning—on an “I” intentionality—learning as a solo pursuit. The problem: The lone genius myth, is just that, a myth. Ask yourself:

When was the last time I truly did anything meaningful by myself, without the help of anyone else?

I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the last time (if there ever was a time) when I created meaning in this world all by myself. Even seemingly solo activities, like writing this blog post, take on a “we” intentionality. For example, in writing this post, I am aware that I am influenced by: research other people have conducted that I’ve consumed, research we’ve conducted as part of the Unicorn Institute project, people in my social surroundings, people in my professional surroundings, and the behaviors of my former students. There are a lot of people who influence my thoughts and my actions. And I’m grateful, because I’m better for it. I’m well-rounded when I’m apart of a shared intentionality.

We’re all a part of a shared intentionality—a “we” intentionality. As professionals, we know we must collaborate effectively to accomplish greatness. We work on projects, together. We succeed or fail, together. We work in teams. We work in groups. We collaborate. We do all of this, together. However, we don’t see a lot of education focus on “we.” Instead, we see a lot of education focus on “I.”

There are many reasons education focuses on teaching the solo student. The reasons go beyond the ever present lone genius myth. For example, it seems a lot tidier to create assignments for a single student and grade that student based on their individual performance than it is to create and grade project-based, team learning opportunities. And standardized tests (at least in the US) focus on testing individuals, not teams. And students get in trouble when they work to solve problems together, because it’s considered cheating. Students learn how to be the best individual they can be but rarely learn how to be the best teammate.

We know that educational systems tend to focus on individual learning, not collaborative learning. And, yet, we wonder why recent graduates enter the professional world not knowing how to have a “we” intentionality. As a society, we have chosen an educational system that hasn’t helped students learn how to be a part of “we.” We haven’t helped them to learn and experience the value in “we.” In essence, as a society, we’ve focused on creating lone geniuses and this has failed both recent graduates and hiring companies.

There is a major skills gap between what students learn and what industry needs. A large majority of this skills gap comes from soft skills—skills that can only really be learnt when working collaboratively with other people. Skills like:

• Presenting: Sharing thoughts and design concepts with peers and stakeholders;
• Facilitating: Extracting design requirements and project direction from peers and stakeholders, while promoting a shared understanding;
• Critiquing: Receiving, giving, and training peers and stakeholders on constructive feedback;
• Storytelling: Communicating and affirming how decisions were made, how principles were arrived at, and how the design will improve the lives of the users to peers and stakeholders;
• Sketching: Communicating emerging design ideas quickly and exploring problem space with peers and stakeholders;
• Professionalism: Behaving responsibly and appropriately with peers and stakeholders; and,
• Leadership: Providing vision, direction, and passion to peers and stakeholders.

To fully explore and learn these soft skills, we must allow students to collaborate on projects. The people who students collaborate with need to extend beyond other classmates. Collaborating with peers and stakeholders affords students real-world experience in developing necessary soft skills while in a safe learning environment.

My vote: It’s time for learning opportunities within educational organizations to support collaboration. But without all of us working together to make this a reality, we’ll continue to have a gap in what students learn and what industry needs. It comes down to one question:

Will we choose lone geniuses or a “we” intentionality?

Project-based learning

Hiring companies tell us they want to hire designers who have worked through the entire lifecycle of a project. They want to hire folks who have experience developing, designing, building, and deploying projects. This desire—this need—has us asking questions like:

“What if education focused on experiential learning?”

“What if students learned by working on projects from concept to completion?”

We’ve come to realize that project-based learning causes both the goals of education and the roles within education to change.

Goal Change

The goal of education changes from teaching to learning. When students engage in experiential learning—learning by doing, through making, by collaborating on specific projects with constraints—they foster a passion for learning. They move from wanting to earn a good grade on material they memorized to wanting to truly understand information and construct new meanings with the knowledge they have encountered.

When students work with real clients on real projects, they also shift their focus from good grades to creating appropriate deliverables that meet client needs. Students want to impress the client so they work more diligently than when they are just managing their grades for themselves.

This goal to create passionate learners can also be seen with the shift from teacher-directed activities to student-directed activities. Teachers do not just assign work, instead, teachers work with students to determine project constraints and tasks.

Role Change

Teachers move from being a “teacher” to being a “facilitator”—a facilitator of learning. They are no longer the all-knowing instructor, instead, they are a resource. As a facilitator, they are able to move away from the art of teaching to the art of connecting. Facilitators are able to focus on being what each individual student needs him or her to be. They serve roles such as counselor/education optimizer, communicator, project leader, and learning coach.

When education is project-based, the roles of students change as well. Students move from individuals to collaborators. They move from seeing their role as independent to seeing their role as interdependent. Collaboration reduces, even eliminates, individual competitiveness among students. Students turn their focus from individual outcomes to working towards the best outcomes for the group and the project. Project-based learning also challenges to stop receiving information passively and instead be constructors of knowledge. They gain the opportunity to see the parts within the whole. Students understand that they are as responsible for their learning as their “teachers.”

Hiring managers have told us that to be “industry ready” UX designers must have a holistic blend of hard and soft skills. Many educators understand this and want their students to succeed beyond the classroom. But each educator asks the same tough question:

“How do I teach students to be industry ready?”

Educators face many challenges when attempting to teach students how to be industry ready. For example, it’s easier to grade hard skills than it is to grade soft skills. And in academia, what gets graded is what gets valued. And what gets valued is what gets taught. This challenge has more to do with our educational systems, governances, and funding opportunities than with educators’ desire to provide appropriate education for their students. These types of challenges occur because the focus of academia tends to be on teaching and not on learning.

Keeping this in mind, let’s change the question a bit. Let’s ask,

“How do students learn to be industry ready?”

When we change the question, we shift the focus from teaching to learning—exactly where the focus of education needs to be. We know that people learn by making, by building, and by deploying. Humans have known this since the time of Aristotle when he said,

“What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.”

One of our goals with the Unicorn Institute project is to understand how to make graduates industry ready. Figuring out how we support students learning, by doing, that’s education’s and industry’s challenge to figure out—together. We’re excited to dive deep into these challenges and work to find solutions that support students and hiring companies.