Designing for an evolving industry

Author: Nien Siao

A typical design job advertisement today asks for a UI designer who can also handle motion, branding, user research and a little code. The industry says it wants specialists but expects its designers to behave like generalists. Design schools, caught in the middle, are now asked a pointed question: are they producing generalists for a specialist market?

It helps to define the terms. A specialist goes deep in one discipline, such as interaction design or lighting, and is trusted for that mastery. A generalist moves across disciplines, connecting space, product, communication and technology, with less depth in any single one. Both have value, and the question assumes a fight that does not exist. Design problems rarely arrive neatly labelled. A client may need a space, a product or an app, and part of the designer’s job is to work out which. In such a world, the most valued profile is the one IDEO popularised as the “T-shaped” designer: deep in one discipline and capable across several. McKinsey’s study of 300 listed companies found that top-quartile design performers grew revenues 32 percentage points faster over five years than their peers and named T-shaped hybrid designers as best placed to make an impact.

Design education feels this pressure first. Degree durations are fixed, while the list of things graduates are expected to know keeps growing. The easy response is to stuff curricula with a little technology, a little business and a little sustainability, until a student has sampled everything and can make nothing well. The opposite error is just as costly: training students early to master a single tool or trend that may be obsolete by graduation. Breadth without depth is a brochure, not a curriculum. To design is to decide, and confident decisions come only from having gone deep somewhere.

What works is a sequence. First, a wide foundation that teaches students to observe, draw, build and critique, and to see that a chair, a screen and a campaign are all answers to a human need. Then a chosen discipline pursued seriously, through live briefs, practitioner critique and work that must survive real clients and budgets.

This is where Indian design education still has ground to cover. Designers interviewed about Mumbai’s schools have flagged weak industry rigour as a persistent gap, with too little exposure to practitioners and internships. JSID was built to address exactly this. Born out of Jagdish Store’s five decades in home furnishings, it pairs a broad foundation with focused programmes in interior design, visual communication, game art and digital product design. Learning is project-based and mentored by working professionals, and the postgraduate programme includes a six-month internship. Its alliance with France’s École Intuit Lab adds an international benchmark and the chance to study across India and France, so students see how the same brief is approached in different design cultures.

Industry carries its share of responsibility too. Many companies, as one widely read critique of design hiring points out, have misread what a generalist is and are simply trying to fill more positions with fewer people. Juniors need mentoring and room to specialise on the job.

For students and parents choosing a design school, the useful question is not whether a programme is broad or specialised. It is where the depth will come from: who teaches, what gets built, and who judges the work. A designer who can think wide and make deep will not be unsettled by whatever job title the market invents next.

The writer is a Dean, JS Institute of Design (JSID); Views presented are personal.