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Democratisation of technology has changed how design is practiced, produced, 'made', accessed, traded, taught, and learned. Crowdsourcing platforms tap into the creative domains of designers and have changed how business is conducted. Collaborative practices and the rise of the citizen designer are shifting the role of the designer in the creation process. At the same time, the culture of design learning is changing. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer free education to everyone. First trials of translating design education's signature pedagogies into the MOOC environment started. With significant changes challenging the traditional design demographic, and how design is taught and learned, how can we educate the next generation designer? This paper provides some insight by presenting an international view from both design educators, and program leaders, on the future of design education.
Keywords: Design future, Design education, Design practice.
Introduction
More designers choose to engage in the social and public innovation sector, applying their creativity and expertise towards transformational opportunities that have a greater impact on society, tackling complex economic, environmental and social problems. As a result, a more expansive view of design has developed (Brown, 2013), extending the popular understanding that designers largely create products and take care of their visual aesthetics (Brown and Wyatt, 2010; Ramirez, 2011). At the same time, more and more people have edged into the creative domain of designers, by offering design services online via crowdsourcing platforms, such as 99designs.com or DesignCrowd.com.au. The democratisation of technology has changed the way in which design is practiced, produced, 'made', accessed, and traded, and how design is taught and learned. Everyone can be a designer. Lupton (2006) describes this phenomenon: 'Just as professional designers want to become authors, publishers, ... and fabricators, members of the socalled "general public" want to try their own hands on designing spaces, making furniture, building Web sites, editing video, modifying software, and so on'.
Concurrent with these developments in the design industry, the educational landscape is changing dramatically. The culture of learning is ever changing. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer education for everyone, free of charge, assuming a fast enough Internet connection is available. Although hands-on design classes are still rare to find in the massive open online learning environment, it can be predicted that...