Thai Blog
NZ Educated Designers in Top International Roles
Monday, 24 November 2008
Former Assistant Designer for Porsche, Professor Simon Fraser, writes about educating New Zealand’s next generation of international designers. I recently returned from a trip to the United States where I visited world-class companies such as Apple and Nike, design schools such as the California College of the Arts and arguably the world’s top design consultancy, IDEO, in San Francisco. What – beyond their commitment to design or their obvious status as leaders in their respective fields – was my reason for visiting these organisations? To visit world-class New Zealanders, all operating as industrial designers in key positions within these organisations. One has to ask, how did they get into these positions of influence?
(via NZ News UK) Typically, design schools in New Zealand graduate more students than there are places in the industry. In Europe or the USA, product design education is tightly focused on a very specific professional career path. In New Zealand, we do not have that luxury.
We have to accommodate a wider range of career expectations for our students and, needless to say, our graduates also aspire to the best that international design practice and industry has to offer.
That’s a lot of territory to cover. But it should be seen as our opportunity. It means that we must concentrate on encouraging agility, resourcefulness and commitment amongst our students – a way of thinking, if you like, or an experimental approach to resolving the unexpected rather than having a set of rules to deal with the predictable. I cannot say it is easy, however when I show work from our students to their counterparts overseas, the response is often, "Your students are allowed to do things that we are not". I would like to think we encourage greater individuality than you see in other parts of the world, where design graduates often appear to have been cloned.
The evident success of this tradition and the ability of designers educated in New Zealand to excel in the global context inevitably raises questions about that popular topic – the brain drain. It’s a topic I cannot get too worked up about. On the contrary, I think it is one of the best educational ploys that we have in New Zealand, particularly where design is concerned. Products travel and so should designers. You cannot hope to have empathy for international markets if you haven’t experienced the complexity of global cultures first hand. It should be encouraged, and the kind of agility and resourcefulness we aim to foster amongst our students sets them up well for travel.
Needless to say, when they return they bring a wealth of knowledge and experience with them. Fortunately this is very much in line with a growing trend encouraged by the Government’s "Better by Design" initiatives. As a result of this drive, New Zealand businesses are finally beginning to appoint design directors at a strategic level in order to integrate design more effectively into their operations and raise their global competitiveness. Similarly I cannot get upset about those who leave and choose not to return – they provide a valuable global network at some of the best design addresses in the world, including those I visited recently in California.
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