STRATEGY / INNOVATION

THE FUTURE OF DESIGN

EDUCATION
BY IDRIS MOOTEE

Design schools have built up an expectation that they can equip students to tackle
complex problems through the power of creativity alone. They cant. They dont. And they
continue to fool themselves with four big myths about creativity.
Myth 1: Creativity and design are inseparable. Here, we have led ourselves down a garden
path of consensus where many of us believe that because designers are designers they
are creative. But design is not creativity manifested, and creativity is not the exclusive to
the design mind. One can be creative without having any design skills or sensibility, and
there are many skilled designers who utterly lack in creativity.
Myth 2: Analytical people are generally not creative people. Here, in subscribing to the
popular oversimplification of human complexity that there are right-brain thinkers and leftbrain thinkers, we assume that those of us who lean towards analysis, process, logic and
science are admit it a little uninspired. As anyone who understands what goes into big

and small leaps of science knows, this is rubbish. The analytic and the creative can, and
often do, live side by side in the same brain.
Myth 3: is that, when it comes to design, creativity must be unbound from the laws,
structures and processes of the day-to-day world. Bound up in the long-standing
mythology of the artist as a visionary or hero who must be free to do what he and he
alone does best, this can sometimes be little more than an excuse for the fact that the
artist or visionary lacks the ability to apply his creativity beyond his own imagination.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than at the intersection of business and design where
many young creative people prove themselves incapable or unwilling to grasp (and design
for) the realities of what a company does and how it operates.
Myth 4: is that which surrounds the recent and very popular theme of design for social
change. While the output of many such projects is little more than a poster and a
campaign, not an actual solution, most of us would agree that such work starts with the
best of intentions. Here, as in the third myth, the challenge is that designers are generally
not educationally or experientially equipped to identify the social or cultural genesis of a
problem and are typically blind-sided by the economics of an issue. The result is that
many develop ideas (not really solutions) that are irrelevant, unsustainable and, in some
cases, lead to further problems. Enter the big difference between design and design
thinking. Today, the number of students graduating from school who are equipped with
design thinking skills is still alarmingly low.
This article appears in MISC Winter 2014, The Balance Issue