What else can you do with a design education?

Courtesy Communication Arts

What Else Can You Do With a Design Education?
by RitaSue Siegel
During the recent economic downturn, designers fresh out of school, as well as experienced designers with­out jobs, have had to look for avenues outside of design to support themselves. The overall economy is improv­ing, but it has not generated jobs. Even jobs for hosts and servers in restaurants are difficult to find. During the depression, many American college grads also could not find jobs in their special­ties (women or other minorities were in even more trouble), so they became primary and secondary school teachers, enrich­ing the lives of children in the following decades.

Today, 40 to 50 percent of design school grads are not work­ing in fields obviously connected to their majors, but this has always been true in design—as well as in science and law. After speaking to many new grads and reading their blog posts, I realized that most have no idea of the range of possibilities under the “design job” umbrella. The only people who can solve the problem of generating earning opportunities for unemployed designers are designers. So I decided to investi­gate what else people with design educations can do, if they can’t find design jobs.

Networks have always been important to finding work and they thrive on disseminating information in a crisis. Companies have cut back spending on paid job posting sites and referrals from employees’ networks are an important shortcut to quali­fied talent when so many apply for each job. Persistence with a plan is the key when there are no jobs with your name on them. Face reality and be responsible. Figure out what you do best; what your skills are. Some people find alternatives by design, others by accident. Jean Mitsunaga, director of career services for Art Center College of Design sets the stage: “The world looks for skills, not majors.” Dan Sellers, a UX/brand creative director advises, “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice…have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” (I add: Give yourself a reality check.)

Some designers want to make a difference and don’t wait to be unemployed to figure out how. Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, says he was the black sheep at architecture school. While others were designing “jewels for people to crave,” he wanted to do humanitarian work and tackle systemic issues like the global housing crisis, the result of natural disasters, HIV AIDS, displacement by war, etc., with long-term sustainable construction and recon­struc­tion solutions. At age 24, he and partner Kate Stohr, started Architecture for Humanity with a Web site and $700. Armed with cell phone and laptop, he met people for coffee often five to seven times a day and openly asked them for $20 donations. In 1999, the first project was designing transitional shelter in Kosovo for returning refugees, providing the tools and space for them to advance their lives. The online call for designs resulted in hundreds of entries, and a number of proto­types were built. Two years later they were in sub-Saharan Africa developing mobile health clinics to enable doctors to reach and treat poor rural HIV and AIDS patients. Today with a staff of 3, the organization has 40 local chapters meet­ing local needs all over the world, and thousands of volunteer architects, designers and building specialists in 104 countries. When accepting the TED prize in 2006, Sinclair said he hadn’t slept in seven years. Read the book, Design like You Give a Damn, and check out volunteer opportunities on www.architectureforhumanity.org.

Making a difference also motivated industrial designer Thomas Peter Alan Robson to volunteer after graduating in 2003 for a small nonprofit (www.jufunze.org) doing educational work in rural Tanzania. Opportunities snowballed for design related tasks. They’d just opened a building for primary and secondary school with unfinished rooms and furniture. He helped design the region’s first playground and created a docu­mentary DVD. He loved listening to criticism of his ideas, and went about prototyping and changing. “It wasn’t about me, it was about them,” he said. Robson introduced barcodes on ID cards to provide data about playground usage, using technology to circumvent the local culture’s aversion to asking such ques­tions. With Excel on his laptop, he organized their financial system. Thomas did whatever was needed in the first eight months, learned the language, and returned to the U.S.

A staffing crisis brought him back (with salary) as director of pro­grams and intern and volunteer leader. By 2006, he was part-time executive director traveling to Tanzania every six months. He provided the local director and donors with a cohesive story of where the organization was going using diagrams, flow charts and other skills. After building local capacity, Robson was eventually able to phase out of manage­ment. Now he is doing mostly 2-D freelance “beneficial design” for people with disabilities in California, but Tanzania will always be a part of his life.

Other roads taken temporarily or permanently include blogg­ing, opening a yoga studio, designing and selling knitting patterns and supplies online, operating a heavy duty tractor, creating and leading a design school’s sustainability program, running a bed & breakfast, becoming a licensing manager for a toy package designer. Some join the military, or wait out the drought working for Home Depot or Kinko’s—or go back to school.

Brian Ward, now design manager at a lighting company, graduated from a West Coast ID program and pursued an
MA in London. He says his eyes were opened and mind expanded to an attitude of self employment and entrepreneur­ship that grew out of necessity: developing and manufactur­ing one’s own products. The chronic shortage of jobs for United Kingdom design graduates is often lamented in DesignWeek’s Letters to the Editor.

“Move to Asia where more companies are bringing western talent in-house, where they have the freedom and flexibility to work outside the traditional corporate culture,” advises Eric Stoddard, design manager, Hyundai Global Design, Korea. 1990 Art Center ‘trans’ grad Harald Belker left Porsche in Germany to return to Southern California with Mercedes. He received a call from a classmate, which led him to design the Batmobile in ’96 and a career designing future vehicles in the entertainment industry for movies like Minority Report, Knight Rider, Cat in the Hat and Fahrenheit 451.

A lawyer friend recently revealed that he graduated from UC in graphic design and became a graphic designer in a globally prominent New York design firm. He met people unlike any he’d known in Ohio doing work he had no idea existed. They were successful intellectuals, prep school and Ivy League grads, and he realized he wanted to be like them. After ten years, he quit graphic design and went to Columbia law school. He found it easy and his new life fits like a glove.

James Carpenter, architecture and sculpture grad from RISD worked for ten years at Corning developing new glass materials with potential architecture applications. Then he returned to architecture, “synthesizing the phenomena of light into the experience of architecture.” He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Judy Nylen, director of career services at Pratt, advises getting a job selling products you want to design to learn what influences peoples’ buying decisions. Want to design and illustrate children’s books? Work in a children’s bookstore and learn why people make their selections. Volunteer for the AIGA or the Art Director’s Club, help put up shows, make connections and keep up with the latest and best work.

If you haven’t analyzed your design skills, several graduate business schools have. They are teaching their MBA students to transform organizations using the ability to: 1) understand context or issues and frame them in an insightful way; 2) work at an appropriate level of abstraction; 3) model and visualize possibilities with imperfect information; 4) develop form/formats to embody ideas; 5) create and evaluate multiple alternatives; 6) add or maintain value as pieces are integrated into a whole; 7) provide value to others.

Business schools like Rotman School of Management in Toronto and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia seek to merge business and design with integrative thinking. They offer the experience of teaming with a client company on real problems using interdisciplinary tools in a collaborative, hands-on environment, learning sketching, diagramming and other visualization techniques and media to enable students to tackle complex challenges in deeper, more holistic ways.

Isn’t this a strange state of affairs? Many designers who already possess these skills don’t know how to parlay them into a role that may not have ‘designer’ in the title but in fact can utilize their ‘designerly skills.’ The deliverables might not be arti­facts—communications, products or an environment, or an interface or interaction design. The deliverable might be a plan for local K-12 education-building curriculum, environ­ments and technology for future needs, an examination of the patient experience in a particular health institution or alternatives to prison. These kinds of situations can be mean­ingfully framed, researched and strategized by a multidisci­plin­ary team utilizing design skills. Plan how to apply for jobs that don’t obviously have your name on them and present yourself in terms of how your design skills can be put to work in the organization you are approaching. Customize your résumé, your e-mail introduction and a portion of your portfolio and or Web site.

Is it really that important for you to design an artifact, or would a systems solution give you satisfaction?

Over the last few years, design has gotten very popular and applications to design schools are increasing. Are there too many designers graduating for too few jobs? Why are we grad­uating average ones? I have been accused of trying to create a design diaspora. On the contrary, I want to save designers from depression by encouraging them to think more broadly about how to find interesting work until this downturn blows over. Some will find work and a lifestyle that may be a better fit than the one they originally set out towards.

If any of this has been useful to anyone, I’d love to hear your story. E-mail me at ritasue@ritasue.com.