Are the design students industry ready?
This post is inspired from the IA Fusion session at UXIndia14 which had both the design educators and design managers from industry in a panel discussion moderated by the energetic @murliman. Look for @kshitiz’s live tweets to get a glimpse of what happen on stage.
The session started with the open question “Does the industry feel that the design students are ready for industry?” and the discussion went into interesting aspects of how the industry and academia can collaborate to produce better designers in India.
This post is my attempt to put forward my observations on answering that first question that started off the panel discussion. This is mostly based on my experiences of interviewing about 50–60 final year design or recent graduates in the last 3 years. I have alsoattended a handful of presentations by design students on their thesis or academic projects.
Design students have great exposure and knowledge
Most design schools these days work with industry for student projects and internships for their students. This increases the exposure of the students on a large set of contexts and platforms. Students already work on mobile apps, wearable apps, enterprise apps, services and etc. Students can also tap into a large number of blogs, design magazines and other resources online. Just a decade ago, these resources were scarce and the students are lucky to have access to this rich set of information.
Design Process : Boon or Bane?
When I talk to fresh graduates, they are all ga-ga about the design process they learnt at school. I sometimes feel all these guys talk about is the process. It is good and bad in someways. First the good, it is great that the students are well trained in the design process. They know each phase of the process and the tools/methods that one can use during that phase. When I look at their curriculum or projects, there is a great emphasis on understanding the importance of each phase of the design process. Kudos to the design schools for doing this.
Here are the two biggest concerns I have:
- Students are not prepared to accept that their very dear design process is the not the exact process that industry follows.
- Students are not really good at connecting the dots, moving the insights from one phase of the process to the next.
Most often I see that the students and recent graduates are not well prepared to the fact that every company or industry has its own design process. Yes, even though I say they have their own design process, mostly the underlying the concepts are the same, it is just how these come together to form a process changes from a company to the next one. Sometimes for whatever constraints that the company has, few phases are either skipped or neglected in the interest of time or budget or just because of the nature of the project. But students are usually stumped when they need to adapt the process they were taught to take into account a few constraints.
Secondly, when I see students present their projects, I can see they have great insights in each of the phases of the project. They know thier tools and methods very well and have put in a lot of effort to arrive at thier rich insights. These insights are however not carried forward to the next pahse and I dont see how all these insights have come together in the final product or service they have designed.
I would be happy to hear your thoughts on what you think is missing in design academia or curriculum and if the design students are ready for industry.
Image credits: MIT Pune by http://productresearch.dundee.ac.uk/physical-apps-india/
