Why creativity and responsibility need to be embedded into Design curriculum

Design is oftentimes considered synonymous with creativity. But the truth is that it an act of influence, innovation and responsibility. While creativity is needed in most professions today, design has the potential to impact lives. In a problem-solving approach, designers need to be observers, thinkers, collectors of ideas and collaborators who can correlate, communicate and extrapolate.

At the core, every child is creative and that everyone can design. All fields of work and ways of exchanging with the world require creativity as a basic attribute of human intelligence. But, as we go through the schooling process, we often have to put aside this creativity and focus on structure and facts. We get used to looking at the world in a specific way. There is judgement and bias, leading to a generalisation of outcomes.

Forward looking

This is why design education needs to play a critically different role. It seamlessly stitches together each student’s journey in a unique way. How we think, what we do, who we are and what matters to us are the touchstones of the entire process of design. This is then overlapped with the needs, aspirations and wants of our users. The outcome is not inward looking; instead it begins with the individual and encompasses the world that we are part of and that surrounds us.

In design education, we learn to turn our minds to ‘making situations better’ and to ‘deciding the criteria by which to make such a decision’.As educators, we need to our students to be future ready. This means what and how we teach have to be streamlined into the future of work and the ever-changing world of design. It also means that we engage with cutting-edge technology through specialised labs and state-of-the-art facilities and impart the necessary skills required to navigate a volatile world: the skills of creative thinking, design thinking, conceptualisation, collaboration, experimentation, brain-storming, all of which need to be integrated into the curriculum. We should empower our students to not only use AI productively, but also ensure that they become the creators or contributors towards the next generation AI.

All this brings up the core question of ethics and responsibility. We must endeavour to make our students leaders of tomorrow by integrating ideas of sustainability, responsible consumption through the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and key human and social imperatives.

Inclusive design

Design educators must teach students to use their powers — to change, assign value, uphold importance, ignore, decide the pace of change, include, diversify or exclude. — in a judicious manner. As Kat Holmes, author of Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design states, “For better or for worse, the people who design the touch points of society can determine who can participate and who is left out... Design can remedy exclusion.”

Design education can teach how to use this power with discretion and responsibility. Responsibility is about awareness, for the greater good, beyond business and beyond sustaining client relationships. Responsible design has to bring in efficiency, aesthetics, and ethics. Ethics are the cornerstone of how we make informed choices, our awareness of the consequences of our actions and how we choose to prioritise one action over the other. Designers make choices that influence the material and visual culture of society. Therefore, sustainability, criticality and materiality need to be embedded into the curricular structure of design education so that students are able to utilise new opportunities created by technology, materials, processes and so on while they examine and address global imperatives.

The writer is Director, Unitedworld Institute of Design (UID), Delhi-NCR Campus, GD Goenka University, Gurugram.