Abstract:

In what ways can the Do-It-Yourself Designers (DIYD), those who trained outside traditional higher education, impact the professional design industry and alter how and what is being taught in graphic design education? Despite possible advantages to non-traditional (online) learning, there is a potential for significant consequences on visual design education and the profession, specifically regarding the quality of the work itself, ethics, professionalism, and higher-level problem-solving abilities.

This study will show how the new self-taught designers learn design in these new channels of information delivery and exhibit information-seeking behaviors. Also important is answering why this line of inquiry is important to both industry and Institutes of Higher Education (IHE). These determinations are supported by compelling observations, such as a consistent annual drop in enrollment in design programs, and an increase in openings of design courses in free, online sources through organized MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and social media platforms. Additionally, as a professional designer, I have observed increased competition for design jobs as the availability of designers has increased exponentially through the global online marketplace. The question now becomes: should IHE and the industry respond, evolve, or ignore this phenomenon?

Why should people care about the influence of technology on IHE? If there are new generations who study design in these new channels, what and how they are learning is bound to alter the industry, especially as formally trained designers leave the workforce. What they are being taught (and what they are not being taught) will become the new norm. For clarity, I seek to study the future of the design industry under the influence of these new information-seeking behaviors from a growing population of DIYD who do not take the traditional four-year graphic design educational path. Educators in design and IHE need to understand how this impacts the profession and what these changes will mean to IHE in the long term.

The findings of this case study will be valuable to the industry practitioners and IHE design educators as they will allow both to develop industry-elevating practices to ensure continued IHE relevance. Additionally, the study will act as a pilot for other professions being decentralized by online learning environments, and it has the potential to start conversations and research in other areas concerned with the concepts of future work and education.

The goal of this contemporary research is to study the potential impacts of non-traditionally trained designers on IHE design programs and the industry. To build a deeper case-study of the interviewees (users of Dribbble, both self-taught and formally trained), the methodology utilized here consists of two stages: individual interviews of Dribbble.com users and analysis of those discussions (stage one) and a visual analysis of their work by expert designers active in the field (stage two). Both of those procedures allow this researcher to build a clearer understanding of the relationship between how the users learned, how they work and how their work compares with each other. The results of these comparisons will benefit discussions about the future of design education and industry implications.

Keywords:

Higher education, graphic design, future of learning, online learning, graphic design education, communications design.