Kingston’s Rachel Gannon on why design education must learn to sit with uncertainty

Rachel Gannon, Associate Professor, Head of School of Design at Kingston University

I have no idea. And I don’t think anyone does. That’s not a comfortable thing to say, and it isn’t an easy thing to live with as a designer or educator. The uncertainty about what starting a creative career will look like creates real anxiety for our whole community; students, academics and alumni. We do need to get better at sitting with that uncertainty and at resisting the urge to race to solutions. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for inaction, which is why we have spent the last year developing our position on design education for a rapidly changing world: DesigningWith:.

The School of Design spans fashion, graphic design, illustration, animation, interaction, interior, and product and furniture design. No two creative practices are the same, and these disciplines are shifting very differently. For example, illustrators have good reason to be fearful: the Association of Illustrators found 46% of those surveyed have lost work to generative AI, while the Design Council’s latest industry report doesn’t yet see a negative impact on design roles.

What connects us is that every graduate now faces overlapping crises at planetary scale: accelerating climate crisis, deepening social inequality, and the transformative impact of AI on work. Design education must change. Kingston University’s pioneering Future Skills strategy identifies the transversal capabilities, skills and dispositions graduates will need to thrive in this world, such as collaboration, self-awareness and empathy. DesigningWith: is our answer, a way of working and a statement of intent.

It starts from the designer as a living, breathing person, and design as a fundamentally human activity, concerned with individual and collective relations, behaviours, needs and interactions. That means shifting our emphasis from what design produces to how designers operate, and from design done for people to design done with them. It points towards a post-disciplinary practice in which design acts as connective tissue across fields of knowledge, and it asks designers to practise responsibly: to develop the ability to respond, and to take on the responsibility inherent in that ability. This is what enables them to ask the right questions. Who benefits and who bears the cost? What resources does this depend upon? What future does this help to create?

So, my prediction is that creative careers will continue to change, some unrecognisably so. The graduates who thrive will be those who can hold uncertainty, have the confidence to ask the right questions and have the agency to respond.