How to Educate the Perfect Design Student

ArchDaily had posted another question: What do you wish you had learned in Design School?

[And since I had first drafted this, they posted their article based on the comments they received: What Should Architecture Schools Teach Us? ArchDaily Readers Respond]

Accredited design programs really are in a tough spot when it comes to preparing professionals. They need to not only develop us as competent/skilled/artistic designers, but they also need to grow our ethical underpinnings and the knowledge and skills to meet the minimum competency requirements for the protection of public health, safety and welfare. Undergraduate programs have the benefit of a few more years to do this, but graduate level programs need to jam a whole bunch of stuff into three years or less.

It’s easy to list the most common things we wish we had learned: technology, project management, business development and a bunch of other skills. I think in some ways that these miss the point. The most successful landscape architects that I have known are successful due to their initiative and a drive to learn and apply. Their design programs provided them with a framework for one big independent study project – a design degree.

If I were to choose one thing that I wished had been stressed in school, it would be that for every class, the instructor put their information into context with how and when it would relate to me professionally. I think it was around Grade 9 during geometry when my teacher explained that our lessons actually had (or would have) real-life application. And guess what? As someone who builds things, the 3-4-5- triangle is an essential tool to me for checking how square something is. Understanding complex geometry is also essential to being able to communicate complex shapes within construction documents. Something as simple as being able to mechanically find the center of a circle is invaluable.

In a previous post (What Does Mentoring Mean?), I outlined the phases of our career and how our mentoring needs change as we grow. The same goes the knowledge and skills we possess.

So, the above addresses the one thing that I wish was presented to me in school (putting knowledge into a career context). I’d also like to offer my thoughts on another question, “What do you wish that students learned in design school?” My answers:

Initiative & Desire

How do you teach this? I think that to a large part someone will have it (or not have it) long before they make it to school. The question as an employer is how much we can foster or encourage it? I’m really unsure. I think there’s an important realization that every person is driven by something different. For some people, their career is just a career… not their life.

The point of this item is that initiative and desire are essential to a highly performing team. Each person delivers 110% (or more) of what the other people expect.

Critical Thought

My background is initially scientific. My training had me grounded within the importance of scientific method. Experimental methodology certainly made sense to me at the time (and was a favourite of mine), but it’s not until now that I appreciatehow it prepared and shaped me for my design career. During my Master of Landscape Architecture degree, my previous experience with methodology and statistics was tempered with design process (design classes) and for my thesis (graduate research seminar). Whether we recognize it or not, good design usually comes from a rigorous approach. I believe it becomes stronger when we apply critical thought explicitly, rather than the implicit (or subconscious) overlays that it normal goes through.

The point of this item is that people need to come prepared with their own framework for how they apply critical thought to a problem.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking in part comes out of critical thought… or is at least a partner. We explicitly create strategic plans for organizations and businesses, but there is an implicit underlying plan for almost everything we do in our lives. We don’t need this for successfully getting a bottle of milk, but most tasks will benefit from some explicit level of: stop, analyze, synthesize and act.

The point of this item is that we need to contribute to a strategic pathway that adds value and increases the chance for success.

Communication

Well… I think you get the point…

I just realized that I’m summarizing the blog posts I’ve made to date and those I have yet to write. I’m trying to describe the qualities that make for someone who is successful at the business of design.

Summary

A challenge in programs is teaching what the majority of the students need. Business development, business planning, etc… are subjects that only a small portion of students will need within their first ten years of practice. They’re also the subjects where mentoring and being exposed to them on the job is critical. It’s not that our academic programs don’t give us what we need, it’s that our profession doesn’t seem to have been indoctrinated into life-long learning. Initiative and desire drives learning for those who understand that they need to learn at any given point. The challenge is to know what we need to know before it’s critical we know it? Senior professionals could likely be more aware of how to assist their ‘higher functioning’ staff in learning, and also those who might just need a little guidance. My experience has been that professional learning is something that we talk about, but firms are few and far between that actively assist their staff with this life-long growth.

So, I’ll be bold and say that the question at the beginning of this post doesn’t get to the core of where it needs to go. It’s the easy question. It was a good first question, because it leads to understanding the real concerns. I want to pose another question: What knowledge do you wish someone had actively offered you on the job? Education doesn’t stop with school.

In closing, the most important thing that school could teach us is how to actively engage with mentoring in order to provide what we didn’t learn in school. And, engage senior professionals into their essential role in this.

(ONLY SENIOR PROFESSIONALS READ THIS: If you don’t engage as a mentor, you decrease your odds significantly for having the right person to lead your firm when you are gone. And if cash drives you, someone who will want to buy it from you.)