Something for design schools to think about
It’s been 8 years since I appeared for the Design Aptitude Test (DAT) at India’s premier design school — the National Institute of Design. Each year, thousands of aspiring students and professionals take this test as the first step towards a promising design career.
All the questions (more like scenarios) were to be answered visually — sketching, craft, painting, even stick figures (thank god!) were perfectly acceptable ways of communicating your thoughts. What better way to get insights into a prospect’s visual perception, creativity and reasoning than a visual medium, I mused.
Turns out things have changed. The new format focuses on multiple-choice objective questions comprising 70% and subjective visual questions, the rest. These multiple choice questions, to my surprise, were in the areas of math, language, reasoning and wait for it… general knowledge (are you kidding me?!)
Rather than jump to any conclusions, I decided to wait and see the questions firsthand. I was curious and skeptical — Will I be able to clear such a test? How relevant will the questions be? What are they actually assessing?
Well, here are some actual questions from this year’s prelims.
Sample questions:
The story and theme are always taken from the Mahabharata and Ramayana in which of the following styles of dance?
Which languages of the sets below was Jesus known to be able to speak in?
The newly introduced Goods and Services Tax is not applicable on which of the following?
At the end of a meeting of 12 designers, each one shook hands with everyone else once. How many handshakes took place altogether?
This just doesn’t make any sense. Is this what we want future designers to be assessed on? Or even worse, prospects missing out entirely because they didn’t score well on conventional educational assessments that equate memory with intelligence.
After this discovery, I decided to look into the CEED conducted by IIT Bombay for admissions across design programmes at various Indian Institutes of Technology. It too has objective and subjective assessment. But, the weightage given to the objective questions is thankfully 25%. This keeps the focus on a prospect’s skills and creativity rather than the aptitude of facts and formulas.
Conventional assessment is failing us
A lot has been said and documented about how our educational systems are failing by assessing students on knowledge instead of learning. In one of the best TED talks of all time, Sir Ken Robinson talks about how schools are killing creativity and coaching students out of thinking and talent. As he describes below, creativity stems out of multi-disciplinary interaction which systems devoid us of by focusing heavily on subjects like math and science. I strongly recommend listening to him and personally regret not having done so earlier.
Design is about problem solving
Design education is learning how to apply practical methods, prior knowledge and talent to solve problems. It’s about applying oneself to the problem at hand through a strong foundation in observation and empathy. These attributes are what separate great designers from the good ones.
So what should we be looking for?
Observation, Empathy and Application
In today’s world, where speed, efficiency and profit maximization are of prime importance, we can rush towards problem solving without the necessary diligence. We need to slow down and dig deeper to reach for the truly creative insights. Creativity is all about making and reinforcing these connections in our brains.
Everybody is a designer. We subconsciously observe and empathise almost everyday in our lives. The key is to consciously acknowledge this and apply one’s self accordingly.
Design schools should focus on assessing and nurturing these attributes. As Sir Ken Robinson says in the video —
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary way of seeing things.
How do we assess design prospects
While hiring, we give prospects small scenarios to solve — something that covers a primary user flow. The output could be a usability review, wireframes, visual design or even sketches followed by a presentation of their thoughts and process. But this exercise, gives us insights into their understanding of the problem and the users, the approach taken and constraints considered. The solution more often than not, is a gradual reflection of all these aspects.
This reveals more about the designers than any previous experience or their academic portfolio. Design students acquire specific skillsets and exposure during their time at school — we need to assess the application of these rather than their knowledge of the design process.
This post is not meant to be a rebuke of the admission preliminaries at my alma mater and other design schools. But there are certain minor aspects of it which could do with a review. I’m not aware of any organisations worldwide employing objective assessments to hire designers. So why should design schools?
After all, I wouldn’t want to miss out on a design education based on the lack of my knowledge of how many languages Jesus spoke or the number of handshakes between 12 designers.
