Design in Extraordinary times – Interim report #2
To recap: BIDA has been hosting a series of events and has launched a 5 questions survey to stimulate debate about the critical future for younger designers, especially the 1000’s who will be graduating this June into, what is increasingly looking like, a deep recession.
At our April webinar we summarised our focus on developing a professional support network by and for younger designers and identified a number of practical actions we could take.
Our May webinar was attended by key figures in the design industry including (ref image left to right) Warren Hutchinson, CEO of Else; Joe Ferry, Belmond; Paul De’ath, UAL-Central St Martins; David Robinson, LA Design and Stephen Green, Imperial College London.
This was an opportunity to discuss some early results from our 5 questions survey. Anyone reading this is encouraged to respond to the survey if you have not already done so, as we intend to continue gathering data for a little longer. The more data we collect, the more authoritative the results will be.
Corresponding to the 5 questions posed, 5 initial answers and the related discussion are noted:
What do you think the Impact of COVID-19 on graduating designers and recent design graduates (within the past 3 years) will be over the next 18 months? On a scale from very poor to excellent, current students and professional designers alike, unsurprisingly, felt the prospects were quite poor. There was minimal difference in sentiment between students and professionals. At our last webinar we discussed the ‘Chasm’ that graduating students will be facing and this was a key theme at this webinar too. Warren Hutchinson is currently employing Imperial Design Engineering students on placement and would hope to employ previous placement students this summer. He referenced conversations with Deborah Dawton at the Design Business Association exploring potential support schemes. More specifically he proposed the idea of an industry backed graduate scheme with selected new graduates moving from consultancy to consultancy in a similar way to graduates in blue chip graduate schemes. This might also accelerate design leadership qualities, one of the areas of focus explored in the second question.
Three areas you feel courses and graduate designers should focus on: This question proposed 9 possible categories of focus. Here we did see a significant difference between students and professionals whereby for professionals the top three areas were core practical skills, creativity and design thinking. For students the top three were sustainable design, human centred design and core practical skills. Joe Ferry suggested that organisations are ‘very invested in sustainability and I don't think there are any companies that will survive very long in the future who aren't, but I think things like design thinking and creativity are core elements to be taught and understand so that you can apply sustainable design.’ Noting the emphasis placed on core practical skills noted by professionals, Joe commented: ‘obviously a lot of practicing designers think that core skills are really important so that you know that with the first job that students get - they've actually got some skills under their belt that they can use in order to be useful’. But as with others on the call, the concept of design leadership was seen as important, but tricky to define.
Based on your experience name your three top UK design Schools/Universities for design and innovation: Responses from professional designers placed Brunel, Loughborough, Northumbria the RCA and Central St Martins in the top 5, with a long tail of design schools with very low scores. This mirrors the results of previous BIDA surveys over the past 6 years. Stephen Green commented that this does raise important questions about what roles students graduating from the ‘long tail’ pursue and the extent to which course content throughout the sector is evolving – or not.
Design career pathways. Your career path satisfaction based on where you are now: The initial survey results show that older designers are more satisfied than younger designers with the 35-65 age group scoring an average 75 on a 0 to 100 scale of satisfaction. Stephen Green queried if this implies a lack of ambition amongst designers – particularly when looked at in relation to question 5 and longer-term aspirations.
What are your longer term aspirations and where do you want to be in the future: Perhaps linked to career satisfaction ratings, the most frequently cited aspiration was ‘don’t mind as long as it’s creative’, whereas the highest rated ambition for students was to run their own business. Younger designers are the future of the profession currently facing unprecedented employment challenges. How might we, as a profession, encourage and support their ambitions?
We do encourage everyone to complete our survey via https://surveymonkey.co.uk/r/BIDA and to forward the link to other designers and design related professionals in their network. In due course we will report more detailed insights and analysis from the results.
In the meantime BIDA will continue to build a nexus of interest around supporting younger designers during these extraordinary times. We will certainly follow up the suggestions and comments made in the webinar with other representative bodies for design in the UK.
As always we’ll welcome further comments and suggestions if you follow up with us at BIDA. We can be contacted on info@britishindustrialdesign.org.uk. We’ll keep you informed of future events and activities.