The first question we asked when we started designing a new type of design school program was: What kind of designer?

All designers work with the basic underlying notions of where design comes from: Every designer starts with an intent — what they want to accomplish. They create their designs to change and enhance the user’s behaviors. They create great designs when they delight the users, or they create poor designs when they frustrate those users.

This is what a design school teaches students to do, whether we were grooming the skills of designers to build physical products, to design public spaces, or to create great service offerings. When Leslie and I sat down to work on the Unicorn Institute, we had a big choice for what we wanted to do.

Leslie and I have each spent our careers working with digital design. Leslie’s been deep in web design education for many years. She has created web design curriculums and truly understands how to create highly skilled web designers.

I’ve been running UIE, which started with studying the designers of software products — everything from email clients and word processors to molecular modeling tools and the software embedded in the International Space Station. Eventually, we moved to web sites and now are spending a lot of time with mobile applications.

Since we were most familiar with creating designers of digital experiences, that’s where we’ve decided to focus our initial work on the Unicorn Institute’s research. But did we want to narrow this focus further? Did we want to look at maybe the visual side of digital experiences, or just the information architecture skills? Should we focus primarily on great interactions and flows, or maybe look at content and copy strategies?

As we’ve done throughout this project, we turned to the hiring managers to find out. We set out to talk to the folks who would hire the graduates from a Unicorn Institute-style school. Immediately, we got our answer.

The User Experience Designer

Our ideal UX Designer has general skills, compared to many of the folks working in UX jobs today. She has a good sense of the visual, understanding sophisticated use of layout, typography, and color. She can organize content and navigation, increasing the design’s findability. She knows how to craft persuasive microcopy and create publication tools for the organization’s content providers. She knows how to craft design flows and envision the microinteractions that deliver great experiences.

These general skills are a lot for designers to learn, especially those folks new to design. Fortunately, our prototype Unicorn Institute program is two years in length — plenty of time to dive deep into each essential area. And 75% of our envisioned curriculum is project-based, giving the students more than 1200 hours to practice and refine their talents.

For the next generation of industry-ready designers, we took the challenge and are aiming high. We think the students we’d attract to a program like this would be ready to take their skills to these heights. They’ll need grit and tenacity to develop their skills in all these varying areas, but we’ve seen enough people who are doing this today to know it’s possible. We still have a lot to learn about how to build a school for UX Designers, but that’s what makes a research project like the Unicorn Institute fun.

We’re hopeful that once other programs see how we’re making it work with the Unicorn Institute, they’ll start to think more about producing UX design generalists. Imagine what the world could do with hundreds of freshly-minted, skilled UX Designers crafting the next generation of digital experiences?

I sat down with Mike and Jessie of Let’s Make Mistakes from Mule Radio Syndicate to discuss how to make better designers and the meaning of UX.

Check it out here: http://www.muleradio.net/mistakes/105/

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?

At the outset, a database with thousands of antiques doesn’t sound that interesting. It’s hard to imagine the design challenges that might arise. Especially when you compare a database filled with antiques to, say, Google Glass or some other Silicon Valley invention.

And that’s the challenge we heard from hiring managers from organizations like Sears, JP Morgan Chase, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when we talked about attracting graduate designers. They felt their projects just weren’t sexy enough to attract the best talent. They felt new design talent wouldn’t see any interesting challenges to the work.

Yet, when you talk to the people who work for those organizations on those unsexy projects, and get them really talking, they get visibly excited. The problems they start to share are wonderfully interesting with nifty constraints and subtleties. Truly sexy challenges hide within these seemingly unsexy projects.

While it could be a marketing problem on the part of the hiring managers, I think the core of the problem lies at the heart of the design schools. Seeing beyond the surface, to uncover the sexy design challenges underneath, is a skill. A skill that schools should be teaching.

How do you teach it? One way is to ensure the students get to that underneath part when they work on their projects. These projects have to be assigned, because, well, who would choose something that doesn’t seem sexy on its own.

Once assigned, the faculty needs to show the students how to see the sexy design challenges and appreciate them. This process has to be repeated, until the students start to see the sexy on their own.

Seeing is a core part of design. Seeing the subtlety and nuance that makes a design project sexy is a wonderful skill to learn, because it invokes an excitement and engagement in the designer that takes the design to a new level.

That excitement and engagement is valuable to the hiring companies and it’s an attractive quality to see in students. Everybody wins when you can uncover the sexy that lurks within.

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.

This is extreme. Of course, it’s IBM and they don’t do anything halfway. But to set up an entire design school for new hires seems extreme to us.

Here’s what blew us away: it’s a school for people already trained and experienced in design. Only a small portion of the six-month curriculum focuses on the IBM Way for design. Most of the time, students are learning basic and advanced design skills.

Every newly-hired designer (and many of the designers already in IBM) are sent to the school in Austin before they start with their groups. It’s an entire program designed to make sure everyone with the title of designer has the same skill set.

Every Company Needs Talented Designers

IBM has set a high bar as to the skills and knowledge their designers need to have. And they aren’t finding it consistently in the designers they’re hiring, especially those coming right out of design school. Therefore, they are doing what any smart company with the resources to make it happen could do. They are finishing the designers’ education.

Only a handful of companies have the resources to pull this off. Yet, every company needs to have talented designers. What are the companies that can’t afford to build their own school to do?

Understanding ‘Industry Ready’

When we started the Unicorn Institute research, we visited dozens of companies deep in the process of trying to hire designers. Every single one of them expressed the same angst: Many of the designers who are interviewing are lacking in substantial ways. Ways that prevent them from contributing.

Industry ready goes beyond being a critical thinker or a creative problem solver. Sure, those are important skills, but they are only a small piece of what a designer does.

An industry-ready designer knows how to go beyond just coming up with a design solution. They know how to navigate the murky waters of implementation to get it built, knowing how to compromise and work through the inevitable constraints that emerge.

An industry-ready designer is fluent in the full gamut of design tools. Not just Photoshop, but today’s critical tools, like JQuery, frameworks, and the various font toolkits. They understand the process for creating responsive designs and can use production tools like Git and SVN.

These companies are also looking for designers that understand how products are built and shipped. They understand how development and engineering processes work. They know when to push back and how to let something go.

The companies also want designers that can work as part of the team. They know how to send emails and attend meetings—something that’s surprisingly not taught in schools.

’Industry Ready’ is Very Nuanced

As soon as we started the Unicorn Institute project, we knew we’d have to dive deep into what it means to be an industry-ready designer. We made it a central goal of the project, with the hopes we can identify techniques for building a curriculum around it.

The great news is that we believe we’ve made some interesting progress on this front. Stay tuned to discover what we’re thinking.