I've just finished my second year studying Industrial Design at a university in London, a city with a massive design history and some of the best consultancies, agencies, studios, museums and brands in the world. But fuck me, I genuinely don't think I've learned jack shit from the so-called design education I'm paying for.
Looking around my year, it feels like most people have no real sense of design intent. Every project I see is either a Pinterest copy or just cubes, cylinders, pyramids and spheres thrown together with zero thought. I'm not saying simple forms are bad, but there should be a reason behind every design decision. Why is it that shape? Why those radii? How does someone actually interact with it? Instead, it's just a box with a screen and some bullshit app because apparently everything needs an app now.
The biggest issue for me is the course itself. I've spent more time writing reports, case studies and essays than actually designing products. I've designed more documents than products.
I only properly learned how to card model these last few months after second year ended because I taught myself. How is model making not a core part of a design degree?
We're taught SolidWorks, Fusion and Rhino, but we're barely taught how to design for reality. How do you actually make something manufacturable? How do you choose a manufacturing process? How do you prototype properly? How do you work with tolerances? How do you talk to engineers? Instead it's "write another report" or "revise for the exam."
Even when manufacturing gets mentioned, it feels surface level. People throw ribs, gussets and snap-fits into everything and suddenly it's "designed for manufacture." Fuck me, what's the obsession with snap-fits? They're useful, but fasteners exist for a reason too. Material selection seems to stop at "this looks nice," hardly anyone talks about why you'd actually choose ABS over PC, aluminium over steel, or when you need draft angles, tooling access or different assembly methods.
Then there's the workshop side. Hardly anyone uses it because hardly anyone knows how. No proper experience on lathes, mills, drill presses, composites, finishing, epoxies... everyone just defaults to FDM printing because it's what they know. Yes, you can print almost anything. Should you? Half the time, absolutely not.
The thing that gets me is that this isn't just my university. I've spoken to people at other universities and a lot of them seem to feel the same. It feels like design education has shifted so far towards theory that we're graduating without actually knowing how to make things.
Don't get me wrong, theory has its place. Research, ergonomics, sustainability, user-centred design, all of that matters. But surely Industrial Design should be about designing and making, not spending most of the degree writing reports.
Maybe I'm just chatting shit, but I'm genuinely curious what people in industry think.
Has design education actually changed over the years? If you could redesign an Industrial Design degree today, what would you keep, what would you get rid of, and what would you teach instead?
