NEW COLLAR, NEW EDUCATION:
HOW STEAM AND DESIGN THINKING PREPARE US FOR NEXT-GENERATION JOBS
originally published by Cooper-Hewitt Design Journal Summer 2019
Ace the AP high school classes, graduate from a prestigious university, and land that dream job — most of us grew up with this prescribed path for success. Creative jobs today, however, demand novel skills and new mindsets that aren’t necessarily being taught within the current education paradigm.
Careers can no longer be defined by the binary of the blue-collar versus white-collar job. There are alternative paths, especially in technology, design, and entrepreneurship — we call those jobs “new collar.”
The path to landing one of these jobs can look vastly different than what we’re used to. New-collar jobs look beyond the four-year degree and instead focus on whether a potential employee has relevant skills, often obtained through vocational training. As more students are exposed to new ways of thinking, my hope is some of these students go on to become the next generation of educators aiming to train the next-next generation of creative thinkers, or new-collar workers.
We are already seeing this change in action with STEAM — the educational approach initiated by the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) that adds the arts to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) model. According to RISD, their goal is “to foster the true innovation that comes with combining the mind of a scientist or technologist with that of an artist or designer.”
In an effort to scale STEAM education, IBM created P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School). It blends high school, college, and career to foster students who can enter the workforce not just with knowledge, but with practical experience that combines academics, mentorship, and paid internships in its six-year program.
The skill set critical for success, yet still missing from a traditional or STEAM education, includes soft-skills such as problem identification, creativity, adaptability, and collaboration.
The best ideas won’t come to fruition until we get the design, engineering, marketing, sales, and product management teams aligned to see the solutions to market.
This is where design thinking comes in.
Design thinking enables new-collar workers to create solutions that truly connect to their user’s needs and builds strong team alignment so that those solutions actually ship out the door. In my nearly twenty-year experience creating digital products, I’ve been surprised by how many product development teams lack this combination of skills to see projects through to implementation.
Currently, there is a burgeoning ecosystem of corporate and private programs aiming to bring STEAM + design thinking training to the masses for this next generation of workers. Cooper Hewitt’s mission is to inspire, educate, and empower through design. With education as a key pillar, programs are developed to offer insight and practice in design and design thinking across all levels of competency in design. Programs expose intergenerational audiences to design concepts and help connect award-winning designers with their communities to facilitate change. While not everyone who participates in these programs is a designer or will become one, an understanding of the design thinking framework could assist in prototyping solutions for problems we encounter in our daily lives. Design thinking is taught as the necessary lifeskill to solve the complex problems of tomorrow.
Over two years ago, I joined IBM’s fledgling corporate-wide design program and I took on the mission of evangelizing our very own flavor of design thinking. My background in design and selling ideas came into high demand when trying to bring Enterprise Design Thinking and a new sustainable culture of design to over 340,000 employees worldwide. We’ve leveraged this new way of working to ship design-led innovative products, including the IBM Cloud Platform, which emerged out of our design incubator program five years ago and is now our fastest area of growth. We’ve also begun programs to introduce Enterprise Design Thinking to students of all ages.
In Austin, Texas, home of IBM Design’s headquarters, we’ve hosted over three hundred students to learn about design thinking and innovation. I’ve done this in conjunction with my own STEAM education initiative called Austin Spark League, which is focused on teaching kids the full product development life cycle, including entrepreneurship, design, and engineering. In partnership with IBM, we’ve hosted annual design-a-thons where high school students learn the art of IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking. Through these weekend-long events, students are prompted to solve a real-world problem that is relevant to them, do user research, envision a solution, and hone their storytelling skills through a large group presentation.
Immense focus is placed on these presentations because they teach storytelling skills so rarely exercised in classrooms. The biggest challenge students say they encountered at our events was not how to program or design, but how to communicate effectively with their teams. Failing to establish a fluid way of working across disciplines within a group leads to silos. Designing with empathy and considering the user and the audience are essential design-thinking skills our students require to prevent these silos from forming in the first place.
When asked for career advice in the creative space, I reassure students that they shouldn’t stress about their GPA, or awards, or even years of experience. What really matters are three simple things. Learn to learn quickly — new tools come out all the time and being able to adapt as they emerge is key. How well can you tell a story? The narrative they weave will help convince others of their great ideas. Check your ego at the door. Humility and collaboration will always win.
Educational collaborations like these supported by IBM and other companies can be a powerful tool that helps students see real-world applications of design thinking. The deeper mission of these initiatives is to help youngsters find their spark: that magical intersection in life when you find out what you’re good at, what you love, and what pays well. If they even get part of the way down this path, they’ll have a lot higher likelihood of finding success.
