Students

Why choose design?

If you want to turn knowledge into action, design is your academic home. Design has found an academic home in art and design, architecture, engineering, business, the social sciences, and in the liberal arts.

Become a designer

To become a designer you need to develop and combine many skills to be able to design well. You need to know how to design and how to use technology to produce your designs, andlearn how to understand different groups of people so you can design for them. Business skills are also useful to make sure your products hit the market and skills in technology, research, teamwork, creativity, planning and communication will all make you a better designer. Most importantly, you’ll need to learn to maintain your passion and dedication for design.

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, so that good design has a customer who is willing to pay for it.

However, this century has seen an escalation of issues that this base cannot solve, and designers have more recently transitioned from problem solvers into projects that tackle the root causes of issues like inequality, global warming, and applications of emerging new technologies. As designers, we can’t avoid these broader questions and issues because many solutions that solve immediate problems may cause larger problems elsewhere. Think about stretch fabric in clothing; it makes our clothes comfortable, but is almost impossible to recycle.

Typical learning path

The path to becoming a designer builds on this history and gives you the technical skills to create concepts with humans in mind, and combine this with commercial skills. At capstone and Masters levels, you learn to tackle larger issues.

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.

• At UNSW, first year design classes give you process skills to manage large problems. You can’t solve the issue of rising sea levels in New South Wales, but if you break it into smaller pieces, you can solve these pieces one after another.
• Next, you’ll need skills to rephrase the problem. In the early stages of design, many variables are open, but also easier to change. Changing direction in research is much easier than retooling a factory. You need research skills to create concepts that filter a signal from noise.
• In the third year, the nature of the signal changes to the broader context. In design, this is usually commercial asany product needs a buyer, but it can also involve science, art, or society at large, depending on your specialisation.
• You’ll show the mastery of these skills in your Bachelor’s thesis in the fourth year.

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.

Design process provides a good map to what is ahead. The yellow heart of the model gives you a map of a typical design process.

You also need these skills to navigate through the process successfully:

• Research skills for the early phase
• Creative skills for building new concepts
• Sketching and prototyping skills. These are discipline-specific. While a furniture builder prototypes in his studio, a chemical engineer may need a table that specifies the values of a molecule for a factory.
• Skills to evaluate and test your prototypes
• Several meta skills including teamwork and project management skills, as well as the basics of legal concepts of intellectual property (IP), contracts, and liability.

You’ll also need to be able to use 2D and 3D programs and have knowledge of physical modelling and computer-aided manufacturing. Finally, you should know how to put together a portfolio and how to communicate in front of an audience as well as in digital and interactive environments.

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 that you’ll need to be innovative.

Many of these skills are easy to describe. You can either use Adobe Premiere or you can’t. Some of the skills are harder to describe in words. For example, one of the most important skills any good designer has is a tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty. Like writers who struggle in front of a blank page, designers sometimes have to create something interesting out of almost nothing. This is a skill you can learn.

You could also try to learn a foreign language. It’s hard to learn Italian, German or Chinese, but it pays off. Do not underestimate soft skills.

What kind of designer do you want to be?

You can be a designer in many different ways. Engineering designers may be passionate about technology, while design ethnographers enjoy creating an empathic sense of humans. Design managers relish strategy and processes, while car designers need be able to draw very well. Glassblowers discover new possibilities with their hands and eyes, while business managers are great at research, thinking and communication.

You can find your own way to design regardless of your background or interests. Everyone is able to design and think like a designer.

What’s required?

Taking a couple of classes about design gives you an idea of design but if you want to go deeper, you should practice your design skills in your home discipline.

At Masters level, design education tends to focus on reflective skills. You learn to think about your design process and change it when needed. PhD studies usually focus on creating knowledge for the next couple of generations of designers.