“That door is too small.”

In the spring of 1999, about a year after graduating from architecture school, I was invited by my former professor to be a jury member for the final year design project. Even though many of the reviews and juries during college were open, and students were always welcome to give feedback to their peers, this was my first time appearing on a jury as bona fide Design Professional. I was easily the youngest member of the jury, both in age and experience, and I really didn’t have much to say. All the other jurors were articulate and intelligent, and whenever they gave feedback to the students, I could only nod my head in agreement. I felt inadequate to the task, and didn’t feel I had much to offer. The extent of my meaningful contribution was the quote above —
“ That door is too small” — made in reference to one student’s project. Even when I said it, and elaborated on it, I knew immediately I was just trying to say something to make it seem that I belonged there. I could tell that everyone else could see right through this charade and knew quite well what an amateur I was. It was humbling.

In the nearly twenty years since that day, I’ve appeared on many, many architecture and design juries. I’ve since become a professor and administrator in my own right, and not only do I appear on juries, I give students and faculty advice on how to conduct them, and how to give the best feedback possible without humiliating or demotivating the student. Despite the years of experience however, I still feel inadequate to the task and quite often, still unsure whether people are taking me seriously. But it doesn’t stop me from trying. I keep trying to become a better teacher, a better designer, a better boss, and a better person.

One thing that has crystallized in my thinking as a design educator (even if the means to do so has not) is that design education must be about about the person. I’m not just talking about the student person, but about all those persons that exist within the student’s circle of influence — the teacher, the administrator, the family member, as well as the student’s potential employer, colleague, client, and user. When one works on making the student a better person, one naturally impacts the people within that circle and one has the potential to make them better as well (not to mention being able to make one’s self better too).

I’ve studied and taught through many design curricula in which the goal was to achieve a certain prescribed graduate profile — a candidate for entry into the noble profession of design. Despite the fact that no two design professionals will ever agree on what exactly that profile should be, many educators and institutions feel that they have an idea and thus go about trying to create a curriculum that builds a student up into that fixed profile, piece by piece, until the student has become the paragon of what that profile entails. An Architect. A Graphic Designer. A Product Designer. But those capital letters don’t really exist. Some governments and professional bodies, for example, have a precise legal definition of what an Architect is, but I’ve never seen two architects who do the same thing, or in the same way. Even more so for designers, who mostly don’t have such regulatory constraints.

So… what should we be training our students to become? Again, the answer is broader… focus on making the student a better person. The hot molten core of a good designer will always be a good person. Compassionate, thoughtful, curious, agile, independent, driven, well-read, aware, eager, motivated, rational, irrational, organized… you can keep adding adjectives if you want; you get the point.

The thrust of a good design education should be to help the student become a better person, a better member in the society to which he or she belongs — an obverver of its contexts, a contributor to its change, a mirror of its past, present, and future, and a commentator of its culture. The rest is (relatively) easy… skills, knowledge, information, proficiencies… these things can be accumulated alongside the main objective, but should not be the main objective.

In future writings, I hope to expand on this and discuss with other educators, designers, and students on how this actually can be accomplished. I’ll try to relate the idea of dialogue as the driver of design, as well as open curriculum, the attempt to be student-centric, promoting innovation, non-academic pursuits, the global perspective, industry expectations, and other things. I’m not sure I myself fully know how this can be done…but I know that I and a lot of my colleagues and fellow educators are trying to figure it out. Hopefully we can share those thoughts and experiences and move in the right direction.

And move the conversation beyond how big the door should be.

(This article was originally published on Medium on 22 April 2018.)