What I Didn't Learn in Design School
I came into my first design consulting job ready to start making, dive deep into research, and craft powerful experiences. Having just finished four years of design school, I was anxious to get started, wondering what the first solution that I would design would be and how I could employ the skills I had been honing for the last few years. I excitedly asked every more senior person I met for advice on how to deliver the best design work. But I was surprised when my first mentor at my job told me that the biggest challenges I was going to face were not going to be design challenges, but it will be the people, process, and organizational challenges that will really test me.
After 2.5 years on the job, I’ve found the resounding truth in her advice. There were many skills that I couldn’t have mastered in college, but have nonetheless entered the spotlight as chiefly important to my success. From the soft skills around getting to know people to working more tactically with planning design work, here are four lessons that I did not learn in design school:
How to design with people who have no idea what it is
In design school, people opt in and are eager to learn more. Even when I was with non-designers in more open classes, students were interested in learning more. There was a baseline understanding which made group projects easier even if skill levels and familiarities varied. But in the professional world, I’ve found there are so many people who have no idea what design is in relation to their work. It is initially frustrating when you can’t rely on a baseline understanding to kick start a conversation.
However, it is a good opportunity to practice explaining things concisely. What is your 60 second explanation of design? Living in the professional world has made me better at explaining design clearly and in other people’s languages. If you can’t explain what design is, show it. Layout the timeline for your design process, where key steps happen, what we get at each, and what steps most impact them. While the lack of a shared baseline understanding is an initial barrier, getting non-designers excited about the process by calling them in is hugely satisfying.
How to get to know people quickly
In college, I could rely on a set structure to get to know people. From classes to the insular college environment making it easy to socialize with others, I got to know some people for years. However, in the consulting world of 8-15 week projects, changing teams, and a zoom environment, it can be hard to build sustained relationships.
I’ve found the most effective way to get to know someone quickly is to find time to celebrate with them. From kicking off the project, to making it through the first week, to a random point in the middle, to the final week, learning how to celebrate the people you met is essential when you don’t have years to get to know someone. My favorite activity is when our new teams dedicate time for a Ways of Working session in which we talk about both work related things like Type A/Type B people, Morning/evening people, and working styles, and also identities we bring to work, pictures that represent us and things we care about, and the human things that we love. Yes we’re here to work, but at the end of the day, the thing that I most common favorite thing I hear about workplaces is the people is what keeps them there.
How to facilitate a meeting or workshop:
I gave a few presentations in college, but otherwise, I completely relied on professor’s planned lessons when looking for direction during our time together. All of a sudden in the professional world, the paradigm flipped and people looked for me to dictate how things were going to go down.
The quick lesson that I learned was always come with a recommendation. Even as a junior employee, I was surprised by how helpful offering a point of view or clarifying question was. Furthermore, I began thinking about how I could design my meetings and not just my deliverables. How could I properly acknowledge where we last left off? How could I quickly explain what the day’s agenda was? How could I get the group warmed up with an energizing activity? How could I get the whole group to participate without making them talk over each other? How could I wrap up the discussion and allude to how this conversation fits in our larger process? Theses questions make the ‘meeting‘ become its own design challenge. Learning how to manage engagements is a crucial skill that I never got to master in college.
How to handle hot situations
Another piece of advice I got early on was “never come in hot…” meaning don’t enter meetings guns blazing ready to pick out a fight. It can be healthy to work out disagreements, but I’ve noticed when someone really lets out their anger, it tends to not be aimed at the right person (often times at a more junior person). Such heated venting sessions are often unproductive.
However, I’ve learned the best way to handle hot situations. It certainly isn’t fun getting berated by someone in front of colleagues. Rely on a more senior engagement manager if present. Otherwise try to acknowledge what you hear as reasonably as you can. While you may not be able to take full responsibility (and you shouldn’t apologize for something that wasn’t your fault), acknowledging the elements of what they are saying goes a long way, such as saying “it’s a complicated situation here because we are trying to be ambitious,” or “There’s a lot of things going on…” Finally, it’s best to end on a point of action. Rather than saying “let’s move on,” offer an easy action that makes it feel like progress is being made such as “I’m meeting with x leader next, I’ll bring this up to our leaders.”
It’s not human to expect someone to remain a fully composed robot and be devoid of emotion. But showing team members that you can navigate difficult situation gracefully will inspire more trust.
So is design school a waste? While I couldn’t learn these critical lessons in school, design school gave the strong design skill foundation to continue building myself on after school. If I had been struggling to learn the design fundamentals on the job, I wouldn’t have been able to focus on the above four lessons as much. Because of design school, I’m put more at ease knowing that I’ll be able to figure out the design challenges that I’ll encounter, making it easy to allocate energy to learning relevant soft and business skills.