Why choose design?
If you want to turn knowledge into action, design is your academic home.
Become a designer
To become a designer you need to develop and combine many skills. You need to know technology, learn to deal with people you design for, and have business skills necessary forpushing your products to the market.
Three sets of skills in broader context
Since the fifties, most international bodies of design define design as a discipline that brings together technology and humans. A good designer studies people and uses their technological skills in solving their problems. Since the eighties, most definitions add business into the equation, and since the nineties, research.
Typical learning path
Like any other form of education, design begins with the basics and gets more complicated as you progress. At the heart of your first year of study is learning how to use a process. Most problems that you will face as a designer are complicated, and the only way to tackle them is through a systematic process. In your second and third year, we give you the skills to enrich this process.
What you’ll learn
Good designers have lots of skills, but the good news is that they can be grouped into a few main categories. You also need these skills to navigate through the process successfully:
- Research skills
- Creative skills
- Sketching and prototyping skills
- Testing skills
- Several meta skills like teamwork and project management, intellectual property (IP), contracts, and liability
- Skills in 2D and 3D and computer-aided manufacturing
- Portfolio and communication skills.
Hard and soft skills
All through your degree, you’ll learn many types of design skills. These skills vary from engineering science to creative techniques and communication skills.
Some skills are harder to describe in words. For example, one of the most important skills any good designer has is a tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity.
You could also try to learn a foreign language. It’s hard to learn Italian, German or Chinese, but it pays off. Soft skills are difficult and challenging.
What kind of designer do you want to be?
You can be a designer in many different ways. Engineers may be passionate about technology, while design ethnographers enjoy creating an empathic sense of humans. Glassblowers discover new possibilities with their hands and eyes, while business managers are great at research, thinking and communication.