Tomorrow’s Critical Design Competencies: Building a Course System for 21st Century Designers

As design continues to evolve so does our approach at ID, especially toward our curriculum and the competencies we build in our students. Major institutional changes in 2017–18 prompted an in-depth analysis of and update to our largest graduate program, the Master of Design (MDes). Dean Denis Weil and the ID faculty kept two things in mind as they upgraded the program content: the school’s pioneering 80-year history, and the position design holds in today’s tech-oriented world. Doing so revealed three new competencies to instill in our students and three important challenges we face in teaching those competencies, and today’s MDes course system structure reflects these considerations. After offering a brief background of ID and its roots, we will present our view of the role of design in today’s world. We will then outline the structure of our updated curriculum—which responds to our view of design’s contemporary role—and discuss some of the challenges we face as we build tomorrow’s most critical competencies in our students.