We All Want High-Quality Design Education: But What Might That Mean?

In November 2018, I was a human-centered design researcher in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta, Canada.It was extremely difficult at that time to hire young designers that could comprehend the human part of healthcare problems, start a systematic process of inquiry, have a good capacity to grasp the complexity of the situation, find patterns in the information collected, interpret them to develop a more complete understanding of the design problem, apply the knowledge to decide how to act, and explain the approach used, the insights gained, and the design intervention plan to healthcare professionals, administrators, and nondesignoriented researchers.Simultaneously, the Faculty of Nursing opened a new course on innovation and leadership, which explored the application of design thinking in healthcare.Administrators in the Alberta healthcare system were discovering the power of 2-day sprints to understand and solve complex healthcare issues.In parallel, I saw an old TED talk by Tim Brown1 stating that "Design may have its greatest impact when it is taken out of the hands of designers and put in the hands of everyone."I wonder, on the hands of who else would we place it?Nurses?Lawyers?Scientists?The fact that graduates are not always ready to practice might indicate a problem with design education, but I didn't think that design, and the teaching of design, would be better off in the hands of other disciplines.If we claim that designers can solve the complex problems of the world but we cannot improve design education, then our claim cannot be sustained.At this point I started a conversation with Ken Friedman, Don Norman, and Jorge Frascara that resulted in the idea of a She Ji special issue on Design Education.