Evolving Design Education: Embracing Digital and Abstract Thinking

Show Notes

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Summary: Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, Dean of Design at OCAD, joins Jesse and Peter to discuss her global journey from Trinidad to Toronto, leading design education through relationships over craft, preparing students for social change, and her vision for decolonizing design while navigating the tension between academic values and industry demands.

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Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership.

Jesse: On today’s show, we’re joined by Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, the new-ish Dean of Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and author of the book Design Social Change. We’ll talk about social change and design’s role in it. We’ll also talk about design education and its relationship to design in practice, and how she uses her design skills to find success in the world of academia.

Peter: Dr. Noel, Lesley, thank you so much for joining us today.

Lesley-Ann: Thank you so much for the invitation, Peter.

Peter: We have some mutual friends in common who have said how impressed they are with the work that you are doing as the still relatively new Dean of Design at OCAD, the Ontario College of Art and Design. And maybe to start off, it would be good just to get a bit of your story.

How did you land as the Dean of Design at OCAD, and what’s this first year been like?

Lesley-Ann: Yeah, so I, I don’t think we have enough time, but I’ll, I’ll take you around some of the twists and turns. Actually I’m gonna go way back to me at 19 , me as a late teenager. I was interested in graphic design first, and I’m from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, and I was interested in graphic design and applied to all of these fantastic schools like Parsons and Pratt and RISD and Howard and got into a few of them and then just didn’t have the money to go.

And my parents said to me, you can study anywhere in the world as long as we don’t have to pay for it. And actually, that has sent me around the world. So I ended up doing undergrad at Universidade Federal do Paraná. Which is a federal university of Parana in Brazil, where I landed just because I was looking for good free education. And I did industrial design there.

From there I went back to Trinidad. I used to teach at the University of the Western Indies. I eventually took leave from the University of the West Indies and went to North Carolina State University as a PhD student at that point. Then from North Carolina State University as a PhD student, I went to the D.School at Stanford for a year on a fellowship, a teaching fellowship. From there, I went to Tulane University. Spent two years as associate director of design thinking at the Phyllis Taylor Center, I’m, I’m messing up the name, but I love Tulane. I love the Taylor Center. And then from there I went back to NC State as a faculty member. Spent some time there, went up for tenure, got tenure, and then got a very distracting phone call from OCAD that said, Hmm, we have a job here that you might be interested in.

And at that point, I actually did not think I was gonna leave Raleigh again for the rest of my life. And, came up to Toronto for the interview with my partner and my son. And we all looked around and said, wow, this city is actually kind of cool. And this city is everywhere at the same time. So Toronto is Trinidad, it’s Vietnam, it’s Brazil. It’s just everywhere at the same time. And, as I progressed in the interview process, ’cause I really just came up for the trip…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann: and as I went further and further in the interview process, I thought, oh wow, this is actually pretty exciting. OCAD is a fantastic university with very clear mission, and so I was very happy that they selected me for the position and I just walked then into this role of Dean of Design and I’ve been learning on the job since August last year.

it’s up and down, up and down, a very interesting rollercoaster.

Peter: It sounds like almost from the beginning you’ve had an academic orientation when it comes to design, teaching others, getting your PhD, and when I think of design, design is, such a craft, it’s such a practice. Obviously most of the people we engage with, they do it for, you know, hands-on design for their job.

I’m wondering what it was, After you got your maybe that first degree in industrial design, what was it that drew you towards more of a teaching and academic path as opposed to a practice, craft path?

The Path to Academia

Lesley-Ann: Maybe it’s that I describe the academic path more clearly because it’s easier for people to understand, right? I, think a lot of us as designers, we learn how to hustle and we, you know, there are designers who get jobs and then there are designers who maybe I’ll use kind of business language, the designers who make jobs, right?

And so, you know, a lot of us really are moving from hustle to hustle to hustle. I started off in furniture design and then really spent there’s a gap in the story that I just told you. I spent a long time doing consulting work as a designer and working for really anybody that I could convince that they needed design, you know, whether it was government ministries, export promotion councils, really anybody, theater production companies, anybody who, who was interested in design or who I could make interested in design, I would do projects for them.

But I ended up being drawn to academia, I’ll have to say, because of the stability, you know, and there was a point where I was like, okay, I need a little bit of stability. I have a child’s education that I’ll have to pay for eventually.

And then there are some countries in the world where there will be fewer stable opportunities for designers. It’s not that design work doesn’t exist, it’s that maybe the stability of a full-time job in design might not exist. So that’s really how I ended up in academia because academia provided some stability when I needed it.

And then what always interested me in academia is that, okay, if you are from a place without design jobs, kinda like what’s the role of design in that kind of space. You know, like having studied in Brazil, going back to Trinidad, those have always been questions that I’ve focused on, you know, what else can we be doing with design? Is it just about graphic design? Is it just about jobs or are there other things that we could make with our design abilities?

Jesse: What do you see yourself creating now at OCAD?

Creating Space: The Dean as Co-Designer

Lesley-Ann: So at OCAD I see myself, this will sound very, very wishy-washy. I see myself creating space.

Jesse: Mm.

Lesley-Ann: So in my last role at NC State, I worked with a lot of PhD students, and at OCAD, like we don’t yet have a PhD program, but I do see myself doing that kind of PhD advisor role almost, with a lot of faculty members who are doing research.

So I, see myself creating that kind of environment at OCAD where people are supporting people to deepen their own practice, creating some additional opportunities for students trying to emphasize that there are many different ways of doing design and, there is space for your design practice in this world of design.

I think of the Dean role as a support role where I am supporting a lot of people to be great.

Jesse: I imagine that entails a lot of context switching as you are shifting from one leader’s needs to the next leader’s needs. As you’re engaging with the leaders of these various design disciplines or programs that are all under your umbrella, how do you manage all of that?

Lesley-Ann: So we have six programs at OCAD. Lemme see if I could count them all. We have graphic design, advertising, illustration, industrial design, environmental design, and material art and design. And these are our undergrad programs. And then we have graduate programs in design, which I have less of a role in.

interestingly, in the undergrad programs, I use this as my entry conversation with people, I’ve had an active interest in all of these six programs. I mean, it’s a coincidence that I ended up here, but, you know, I always, I loved illustration as a teenager. My first job was in advertising. I worked in graphic design for a little bit because that’s where we all find work. I am an industrial designer. I’ve collaborated a lot with architects, and I used to do ceramics and jewelry, and so it’s that I am often drawing on a little bit of knowledge that I might have, you know, I am then this generalist and I’m drawing on some general information that I have on all of the programs.

Then my own knowledge of academia and teaching and learning, and that’s how I’m having the conversations with the different chairs of the programs, or the faculty members, and then my design practice most recently has been about co-design.

And so actually, I’m using those skills because I have to do a lot of listening to understand people’s work. And then sometimes I’m co-designing with them, right? Helping them to co-design their research, practice, co-design new courses that they’re teaching. Sometimes even co-designing experiences with industry. That’s really how I’m navigating all of these conversations. I’m using a lot of my co-design skills, as well as some of my knowledge from design across the disciplines.

And then, because I’ve been around a block a few times, you know, there’s stuff that you end up knowing because you’re old, right? Or you end up knowing how to have conversations with people because of age. And so some of the work that I’m doing is just based on that positionality, right? You know, I, I have a, a design professor colleague. I have to laugh as I say it, but he’s, he is been calling me an elder for a few years, and like would come to me for mentorship.

And now in this role it’s like, okay, I’m taking up that space and maybe assuming that kind of positionality as, okay, I’ll give you support and guidance to get you through the process. So that’s the way I’m doing this work now.

Peter: It sounds like, if I understood the six programs at OCAD, at least the undergrad programs, they’re not particularly digital. But I saw that Ben Shown from Blink UX had visited your class. And, obviously that’s a UX design practice.

What is your relationship to more digital design, UX design? How are you seeing that in the context of your school as well?

Embracing Thing-lessness

Lesley-Ann: Yeah, so now we, we might get into the conversations that might get me in trouble, but that’s fine, right? There are a lot of places where the UX content isn’t explicitly visible in the titles of programs, right?

I visit a lot of design schools and I think that a lot of design schools, we have these legacy titles. We have 20th century names. We might have actually like Bauhaus and Ulm kinds of names of programs. And I think that there is digital content in a lot of the programs, but it’s not always very visible, right? So the UX, UI work is happening primarily in our graphic design area, but also in industrial design.

And I saw this in the last school that I was in as well. We would see UX, UI in graphic design and industrial design, right? Oh, maybe Ben said this, somebody told me that architects make the best UX designers, which I didn’t know, right?

But, you know, so I think that there’s digital content everywhere. I don’t think that the names of the program clearly say where the digital content is. So actually like one conversation I’ve been leading in our program is, I’ve been having people brainstorm around different “what if?” scenarios. So one of the scenarios that I gave people recently is, well, what if we just concentrated less on things, you know, and focus more on a thing-less area of design?

Because our programs have legacy titles, they’re really programs around things, right? And so, you know, if we make the thing-lessness a little bit more explicit maybe that might prepare people for strategy and UX and UI and management and all of these other areas where there are in fact a lot of opportunities for design, right?

But I really just kind of planted the seed for the conversation and maybe ran away. No, I didn’t run away, but I do think that we will continue that conversation. Our masters programs are, I’ll say, thing-less programs. So we have SFI, which is Strategic Foresight and Innovation, Design for Health, and Inclusive Design.

You know, those are our three design masters programs, right?

And even though I’m asking people to think about the thing-lessness, right, I also like things to understand other ways of thinking. So, when I learn to make a chair, for example, I’m learning a process that I then can apply to anything.

And I think when designers can see their work in that kind of abstract way, then they can work anywhere. And that’s really I where wanna push the conversation to at OCAD where, you know, even though people are learning in these initial silos, that they understand, well, actually it’s a process that they’re learning that they can then apply in many different contexts, and we are bringing you here and, making you comfortable with being flexible and then you can take that flexibility in other places.

Peter: This will sound diminishing, and it’s not the intent. To what is OCAD a trade school, like, are students coming there to get skills to get jobs, versus maybe a more kind of classical view of education where they’re going there to engage in a passion and who knows what will come out on the other side, but the journey is the reward.

How are you framing that now as dean?

Lesley-Ann: So we have both conversations here, right? Where we do talk about, you know, what jobs are people going into. And then in some of my work, of course I have to work with industry and the thing is, I am more on the other side where I think education is about people learning to be flexible and learning to address issues and people exploring different paths.

And I do very often lead conversations like that. I’ve just had to remember that I actually have had the privilege of paying for very little education. You know, I studied in Brazil for free, studied in Trinidad for a fraction of the cost, had a, PhD scholarship. And, you know, sometimes when I talk about education being the journey, I do have to also think about the people who are mortgaged to the hilt to try to pay for education.

So, you know, we have to have both conversations at the same time. So we do have some areas in our programs where people are very, very job focused and very focused on what are the immediate rewards of the educational experience or immediate outcomes.

And then there are other people who think about it much more abstractly, and are thinking about the journey and the collaborations and the research that will happen, and then the research outputs. And so I am kind of like moving between both conversations all the time.

And maybe I should say too, then in the way that I am starting to promote collaboration, that’s also on the journey side of it, rather than the specific job side of it, where I’m really trying to promote collaborations across disciplines, where we could be exploring problems much more creatively. That leads to the jobs that people are looking for, you know, and creative experience, the different experiences of school lead to the outcomes that people want.

And actually also my hesitation about talking about jobs so much is that some of us don’t want jobs and that’s okay, right? I actually heard that at undergrad and I felt it was very transformative for me to hear that early, where my professor walked into the classroom and said, ” There are no jobs for any of you,” which is frightening to hear.

But his point was that we make them, we make the jobs. And I found that very empowering. And actually I didn’t really look for a job then for the first 10 years after I graduated because I was listening to what this professor had said and kind of like following different opportunities. And then I had a baby, and then I realized, okay, maybe I do need a job.

Peter: Separately, we can talk about the role of design and its relationship with capitalism.

Lesley-Ann: Yes, yes, yes.

Jesse: I find myself wondering about change, you know, and the relationship between academia and industry being so much kind of dictated by the pace of change in each of these spheres. And often I feel like the challenge for academia, and you referenced this when you talk about, you know, 20th century titles and things like that, the challenge is to stay in step with the current state of industry while also providing the necessary validation and reflection that academia has to offer.

And I’m curious about how you see that tension and how you resolve that within your programs.

The Importance of Relationships

Lesley-Ann: Yeah. I don’t know yet if I’m resolving it. You know, one way that I think about that tension is that there, well, I mean… I’m gonna respond in a few different ways, right?

One conversation that I’ve had with students actually is about relationships and just the importance of relationships. And this is gonna sound maybe a little airy fairy, but it’s real, right? That school context, university context is creating an environment where these relationships are formed and whether these relationships are formed with other students, with faculty, with alumni, with industry, you know, all of these relationships are actually important for students’ growth right now.

If we are faculty that are always just embedded in our work, in our teaching, we maybe can’t keep up with the pace of change of industry, right? We have different areas of focus, you know, we are trying to do different things with the way that we teach.

What we can do is we can continue to build our relationship with industry, right? We can, you know, be bringing industry partners, whether into classes, giving talks. Again, we can be building these relationships with industry partners.

And then I think our job is to keep people flexible and fresh so that, I have to say, industry continues the work, right? I, don’t think that it’s possible for any school to prepare students a hundred percent for a specific job, but, you know, we can have people leave school with the right mindsets and the flexibility and the ability to innovate and all of that, and then they continue learning in industry.

Peter: Relationships is something Jesse and I talk a lot about in the context of leadership, right? To lead is to relate to others and bring them along with you. And the reason we talk so much about it is that designers are rarely taught how to develop strong kind of business relationships, at least.

Lesley-Ann: Mm-hmm

Jesse: The focus is on craft in their development.

Peter: …and we talk with folks who’ve been doing design work for a decade, they get into a leadership role, and all of a sudden they now need to tap into their soft skills. It’s not, soft skills is not a phrase that I like, but it’s, it’s often how it’s labeled.

And so I’m wondering, given what you said, how do you see helping folks earlier on and possibly in school develop these soft skills? Is that something that’s maybe an evolution in what you’re teaching or, how you are guiding students so that they are better prepared when they enter the world?

So often design programs are tailored towards design services, like, agency practice, which is very different than what most of the designers are now embedded in an enterprise. And I’m wondering how that’s maybe changed how you are setting people up as they leave school.

Lesley-Ann: So I am going to take what you just said and use this as a soundbite for everything. You know, just the importance of relationships I don’t know how I ended up learning about the value of relationships, right. But I, think that the relationships are as important or more important than a craft.

And maybe it’s that if you are going into leadership in particular, I changed the way that I thought about design work. Maybe like if I think about my first 20 years of practice as a designer, which has aged me, right? I think somewhere after the first 10 years I was like, oh, it’s not just about me. It’s actually about all of these other relationships that I need. And then started to realize that these relationships also lead to other opportunities or learning,

so that has been a work in progress.

But we have made this a visible challenge as we talk about teaching post pandemic. You know, even though the pandemic was five years ago, we are still feeling the impact of the pandemic on the teaching and learning.

And I’ve been explicit in my leadership role saying that we are talking about relationships and we are going to do what we can to make sure that the students are building relationships, because the pandemic kind of took that ability away from them, right?

Now some of it is my philosophy driving this where I think, okay, like I said, we can’t teach you every single skill, but we can encourage you to have relationships with people who have the skill, or we can encourage you to develop relationships that will lead you to other opportunities, so it’s that the relationships are needed sometimes to maybe backfill.

You only have a, finite amount of time. That sounds so transactional, right. But I mean, you know, you, you have a finite amount of time in school and, in focusing on your relationships, other things can happen even after the school experience is gone.

Jesse: I find myself wondering about the change that is going to be required for the school to create the space, as you put it, for these things to happen, and your role within that as change maker. You’re relatively new in the role. There are clearly some expectations that came along with the chair.

And I wonder about how you make the case, build momentum, get in there and make change happen, as a new leader in an organization like this one.

Lesley-Ann: So let me drop a name now. My friend Don Norman. And, seriously when I became Dean, Don said, alright, you’ll now be a public figure. I was like okay. And then, you…

Peter: So you had known Don already.

Shaping the Future of Design Education

Lesley-Ann: Yes, yes. I have a kind of funny story about… Don probably doesn’t know the first time we interacted, but I think I had a paper out there in the world, that was written even before I started my PhD, like a really badly written paper that he thought was interesting actually.

And I was writing about design education, like Trinidad or something like that. And he emailed me about the paper and then he kind of commented and he says, and your citations are wrong or something. We started off having these email interactions and then our relationship got closer through the Future of Design Education projects.

And then we’ve had quite a few interactions since. He also told me, well, you can’t change everything or you can’t get everybody on board the train and you have to make small wins. And so that’s really you know, the same way I talk about relationships for the students. I am working on my relationships with faculty. We have about 70 full-time faculty. And so I’ve been working on the relationships with them and figuring out in each relationship what’s a small win or a win-win kind of scenario, And how can we then amplify that to do other things? S

So that’s where you hear maybe MBA talking, right? Where I’m really trying to see, well, okay, what is it that people are trying to get to? How does that align with some of our academic and strategic goals? How does it align with trends in the industry or in academia, you know, and how can we get everything to align so that people are thriving.

I really like these words, thriving, flourishing, joy, and I think that despite the crazy context that higher education might find itself in, that I really have to figure out how am I supporting people to do well in the work that they’re doing.

Jesse: So for you as a leader it seems like there’s always the risk that that support going out turns into no time left for anything but line item firefighting with people all the time.

How do you maintain balance between being a support resource for your leaders in the way that they need, and your own leadership?

Lesley-Ann: So I carve out some time for strategic thinking, right? On my calendar, right? I mean, it doesn’t always say strategic thinking. But I do some big thinking regularly. I ask other people to do big thinking as well.

And the first time I did it in one of our meetings, somebody said, we don’t have time for blue sky thinking. I’m like, yes we do. You know, because the thing is, higher education right now feels like it’s on fire. I mean, I’m in Canada we are not dealing with the same issues that you’re dealing with in the States, but you know, everywhere in the world right now, higher education actually is in chaos, right?

And it’s like we can’t only be putting out fires. We do have to think a little bit more long term, and we have to make sure that we have space for that, right? So there’s that. I regularly do professional development. You know, I find courses, go to other people’s events and learn. I make time to learn. That’s what it is.

And then I work with a coach who’s like a therapist and she listens to me and then she says, you’re not crazy, you know? So, so yeah, I think to balance things, we have to create the time to be doing different types of thinking.

And then actually, I hate to say it, I switch it off at a certain time, you know I’m a parent, I’m a partner, I, really try to turn off the workday at a certain time and then go and walk or kayak or whatever, you know, with people who maybe love me a little bit more than um, than the other people I support, right?

And, and then that keeps the balance that, maintains it.

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: So I should have realized this earlier. You are the second Canadian dean that we’ve had on our show actually recently. In that we had Roger Martin, I don’t know if you know Roger, he had been the dean of the Rotman School at University of Toronto. He’s not there anymore, but we had him on because he was very much about the intersection of design and business.

And one of the things he mentioned is that when he became Dean of the Rotman School, He had a vision for the program and it was actually a very simple vision. He said he wanted the Rotman School to be Canada’s name business school outside of Canada, like to have visibility outside of Canada.

And then it took him 15 years or something to like chip away and make that happen. But he was able to make that impact.

And I’m wondering your vision for the school at OCAD, if you had one coming in, in terms of what you thought it could be, or now that you’ve been there almost a year, you know, what do you see as your vision? What is that change that you’re trying to lead to towards, for the school.

Lesley-Ann: Yeah. It’s nice that you interviewed Roger Martin. I’ve never met him, but I mean, he did what he set out to do because I knew about him and Rotmans before I even knew about anything in Canada, right?

My big vision before I got here was I was like OCAD has decolonizing design written in its academic and strategic plan and goals, and so there is an energy around decolonizing here that I’ve not seen in other places that I’ve worked. And so my big goal when I came in was around making decolonizing design, making OCAD really the visible place around the world for that work. And I imagined us, you know, doing partnerships with people in New Zealand and Australia and South America and, you know, really then bringing this more fringe movement into mainstream design.

And then of course, I would’ve been building on Dori Tunstall’s work before me, right? ‘Cause was the dean before me. And I think there’s still a place for that work. I am now of course recognizing that, okay, Roger Martin took 15 years to do that. You know, deans, we think in five year terms. And so my first five years, I think the goals might be a little bit more conservative, right? When I came in, I found that people wanted more community post pandemic.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann: So, you know, some of the work is again, about, actually all of the work is about relationships. So it’s about relationships between faculty and students, relationships with academic partners.

So I’ve been having a lot of conversations with universities in the area about, okay, let’s collaborate some more, let’s do more research. I am, in fact, investing a lot of energy into research because I’m coming from an R1 university in the States, North Carolina State University into OCAD.

So I’m trying to bring in that kind of research mindset as well. So, you know, some of my goals are around research relationships, and then some industry partnerships. So, I mean, little bit more conservative, but it is in fact, you know, they’re tied to what Roger Martin’s goals are. You know, definitely about OCAD’s visibility, you know, making sure that OCAD is very visible globally.

And then that we are doing research, and we are driving industry practices around our values, you know, so OCAD is a very values-driven institution and we are transparent about our values, and I think that we can also transform some of the industries that we are active in, you know, around our values, around decolonization and indigenization and anti-racism and all of these words and philosophies that really drive the work that we do.

And I think that we can impact the industries that our students go into.

Jesse: It’s interesting to think about how this mission carries within it the notion of design as a tool for creating positive change broadly in the world by changing design itself. And I’m curious about the relationship between design and change as you see it, because I know that this is something that you’ve definitely given some thought to over the course of your career.

Design as a Tool for Social Change

Lesley-Ann: Yeah. I think as designers, we are always trying to change the world, right? You know, okay, so let me use some quotes here. So there’s that Herbert Simon quote about design is always the practice of, changing existing circumstances into preferred circumstances, right?

And so if we are thinking in that way, then everything that we do in our work is about imagining this future and thinking about what are the steps to get there, right? So I think that it’s a real superpower that designers have.

You know, working across five different universities, I’ve seen that almost every design student, you know, when they are given the opportunity to create their own projects, their projects are very often about creating social change and campaigns and making sure that the world is better. And I think that we could really lean into that.

So actually, one of the scenarios that I gave the faculty in our brainstorming activity a couple weeks ago was about what if our program was just designed for social justice and maybe we got rid of all the silos, and everybody then is kind of focused on that social change or social justice or, you know, because a lot of the projects that faculty want to work on, that students want to work on, are in fact in that social change, social justice space.

So I thought, well, what if we did that, instead of having an advertising program and a graphic design program and a… right? People have to warmed up to these conversations.

It is what we do as designers. It sounds so airy fairy, you know, we, are always trying to make the world a better place, right? And so, you know, we could actually be more explicit about that too in our education.

Peter: I was thinking back to your MBA, as well as a PhD in design, and your teaching design, but you maintain this relationship with industry, so you’re kind of straddling these, and you’re talking about how designers seek to drive meaningful change, positive change, but designers are also, in my experience, really good at getting in their own way of realizing the change they seek, right?

They don’t focus on relationships, they focus on the thing. When it’s time to speak up and engage and do the work of driving change, which often requires politics and communication, designers are, like, many designers are just back all, all the way off of that. They’re like, no, not me.

But the reason I brought up the MBA thing is, you’re seeing folks early on in their development, and some of it for me is, personality types that gravitate towards different fields and practices, right?

And, you know, you’ve spanned both. So you kind of suggest that it’s not a hundred percent, and I don’t mean to be too stereotyped here, but there does seem to be a personality type that drifts towards design. There’s perhaps a different personality type that drifts towards business and marketing and finance.

How do we help those folks in design embrace what those folks getting an MBA learn about how to show up with others and make change? ‘Cause that change management’s a formal class, right, In an MBA program, that designers are never taught.

But, what would it mean to try to seed earlier on or help those folks, whose personality might encourage a certain introversion or reticence or focus on the work and craft, that if they want to make change, they gotta show up differently?

How is that going from your point of view?

Lesley-Ann: So I used to teach a class, which I call a social studies class for designers. And I’ve actually met more and more people who are teaching that kind of critical education that was absent from design education. So, you know, how do we get designers to think more critically? We definitely have to weave that critical thinking into the education.

So my design education was about pretty things. And that’s not enough. If designers want to change the world or whatever we say we want to do, we need to know more about the world. Like you said, we have to understand politics and current affairs and, you know, we really need to have broader educational experience than designers used to get some years ago.

And so I’ve seen more and more people, you know, like at the academic conferences, reporting on how they’re changing their classes to have more critical discussions in the classroom and then have designers engage with people more.

So I think of the business people as different though. The first conversation about the critical literacy, that’s like getting the designers closer to the social scientists and maybe the humanities people, so that we are seeing the world through a different lens.

And then in my MBA, actually, like, organizational behavior and organizational development. Those were the courses that fascinated me because I could see, again, the designerly-ness in those courses that I had never had to think about before, right?

So, to answer that part of the question, I don’t know that I’ve seen a lot of people doing that early on, you know, having people understand organizations and how organizations work, how people work in that kind of way. I haven’t seen a lot of that in the undergrad training, but I’ve seen a lot more people bringing critical conversations into undergrad.

So I do think that design professionals will begin to change and look different as this kind of education gets a little bit more common. But the thing is, there is always that tension between, let’s just focus on craft and skill, and then let’s get a broader education. And I will always be in the camp of let’s expose the designers to a broader education. Because anybody can learn the crafts or I hate to say, now we bring the AI in…

Peter: That relates a little bit to what I was thinking when I was last in Toronto, I didn’t get a chance to see you in a conversation with Michael Dila, where you were discussing the future of design.

design

Lesley-Ann: Yeah.

Peter: And I wonder when I ask you what is the future of design, right, what are you leaning toward as you look out? ‘Cause you’ve mentioned co-design, right? You’ve mentioned relationships, you’ve just mentioned AI, right? What is your sense of the change and trends that are brewing, and how are you going to, I don’t wanna say maintain relevance, but, you know, stay engaged, appropriately engaged. Not just yourself, but the school that you’re helping lead, so that it, especially in what feels like a time of, I don’t even say rapid change, just discombobulation…

Lesley-Ann: yeah…

Design Will Always Be Relevant

Peter: Just, it’s a weird time right now. So how are you steering the ship through that and toward what’s the distant point on the horizon there?

Lesley-Ann: Okay, so again, this is gonna sound so fuzzy. I, It’s about flexibility and relationships. You know, that’s kind of like the only thing that’s gonna get us through this rollercoaster, right?

I am not afraid of AI or higher education is under threat, I mean, I’ll say that I’m not afraid of that threat, we’ll always be relevant. I think that we will be less relevant if we are fixed and we say things like: This is the curriculum. This is the way we do things. This is…

So, it’s that we have to be part of these conversations and we have to be experimenting with the different trends as they come and go, right? So if the trend now is AI, we all have to kind of figure out a little bit of it, right? We might not have to stay on the trend, but we have to understand what it does.

You know, I think that the core skills that we have will always be relevant, and it’s up to us to also emphasize our relevance to whatever society we’re in.

Jesse: What are some of those skills that you think will keep design relevant in the future?

Lesley-Ann: So, I think that making is important.

Well, actually understanding the agency of making things, you know, just that thing of being able to sit down and even without AI or anything like that, sit down and say, well, okay, this is the idea I have in my head and I get this idea from my head onto a screen or onto paper or whatever.

And then the thing is made, whether I make it with my hands, or whether I’m using 3D printing or, you know, I think that that’s making skill and that making ability will always be relevant.

And not everybody in society, even though everybody makes, not everybody is aware of that agency and that power of making things.

And I, in my own research, I’ve taken that agency, designerly agency, and used it in children’s education, and that’s how some of the work that I do around social change is tied to that thing of knowing, I can make this object, maybe I can make, this will sound so hubristic, I can make the world, right?

But knowing that you can take power of things around you like that, I think will always be relevant. Even if the tools we are using to make things will change.

Jesse: I’m struck by the idea that design is inherently about agency, about empowerment, about the ability to do more with your dreams than just dream them.

Lesley-Ann: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I have an industrial design bias, and those of us who do industrial design, we have no idea what jobs we are gonna do, right?

But I think when I speak, ’cause a lot of people just never get jobs in, you know, there are some jobs for industrial designers, but I’d say they’re fewer than graphic design as a matter, but industrial design education, I think, gives you a sense, well, the industrial designers I know think that they own the world. Why? Because they know how to make a chair. They know how the printing press works. You know, they could kinda look around a room and break apart every single object in a room. And, that gives them sometimes this kind of sense of power that maybe makes them very obnoxious.

But I think that that’s, that’s good for people to know that we make this world around us. Well, I, I’ll use language that I use often these days. The world doesn’t just happen to us. We make it. And I think that that’s good knowledge for us to have. So that it creates some action as well from people.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Because inherent in that knowledge that we make the world is the implication that we can remake it anytime we want, and that’s a powerfully optimistic statement, I think.

Lesley-Ann: Yeah.

Peter: You mentioned earlier, OCAD’s values system, or set of values. And some that you inherited around things like decolonizing design, but you also recognize that you’re not gonna like “Decolonized design, check, moving… What’s next?” Like that’s, that’s a process.

But I’m wondering, something I think a lot about is a challenge that designers, but particularly design leaders, face when it comes to values.

And this touches, I think on some of what we were talking about with respect to agency. Design is a humanistic endeavor, right? It’s in the arts and humanities.

We are often, though, designers and design leaders, are working in industry. And industry has a different set of values, a corporate set of values, a more calculating set of values. An MBA set of values, maybe a little more mechanistic, little less about agency and creativity and generation, and a bit more about calculation and deconstruction and analysis, and a different set of tools.

And I’m wondering, navigating these different value systems and your engagement with industry, you’re talking about trying to help bring some of OCAD’s values into industry. Like my country’s on an anti-DEI kick unfortunately…

Lesley-Ann: mm-hmm.

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: …Canada I know it’s a different conversation there.

But I, I imagine there’s tension in the values that OCAD is encouraging and the values that industry, even your industry partners are willing to receive. I, I don’t know how much decolonizing talk you can bring inside some of these types of corporate environments.

How is that conversation going, and how are you helping designers think about, or maybe even just for yourself, think about living in these different worlds of a more humanistic practice, of care, of ethics, of equity, and then a more corporate industry mindset of business results.

Lesley-Ann: Well I try not to think of it as different spaces. And when I used to teach, we would have conversations about ethics and the students would talk about what do I do if I get a job offer from tech company, whatever.

And I would actually say, I want you to take that job because I would prefer that you are designing my technology than the person who has not had these conversations about ethics. That’s what my hope is, as leader, as an educator, that we are having these conversations about ethics or we are having these conversations that are driven by values, and the graduates will take these values with them into the work that they do.

Interestingly, well, in Canada you can have conversations about decolonization everywhere and indigenization and, you know, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you know, we went into a conversation with RBC or TD Bank and we led with decolonization because that’s the context that we are in, because everybody talks about it all the time.

Maybe in 10 years time in design we’ll see that because really, well, okay, things are complicated on your side of the border because people can’t talk about these things anymore. But if I think about design education, even up to last year, at every single conference I went to, people were talking about these critical issues so much that I would’ve said then in 10 years time, everybody in design would be bringing these values into everything that they would doing, right? And we wouldn’t be thinking in this kind of bifurcated way, right?

Now, I’ve always said to my, like, industry partners, I’m in academia and I know I, maybe I’m in a little bit of a bubble or privileged space where I can lead with these values, but I, also say at least I can do this work and be public about this work.

And that can drive maybe the way some people in corporate spaces have their conversations. So you know, we can lead the corporate world to continue to talk about values and I am in fact hoping that our students and our graduates will go out and take the values conversations with them into the world of work.

Jesse: Speaking of optimism and design, what are you most optimistic about l ooking ahead?

The Role of Design in Positive Change

Lesley-Ann: I’m generally optimistic. I’m a little bit over-optimistic about futures, you know, and equitable futures and I imagine social change in this way where we reach one barrier and we eliminate it, and then we find the next one and we eliminate it and we find the next one.

And so I’m just kind of optimistic that we will be always moving forward and changing the world and it will get better and better and better.

And so 10 years from now, everything is gonna be a lot easier for people than it is now. And maybe I’m thinking explicitly about people with marginalized identities.

You know, I think a lot about accessibility, about homophobia, transphobia, you know, so I, just imagine that life will be easier in 10 years time. Fingers crossed.

Peter: What’s the role of design, in driving towards this positive change?

Lesley-Ann: There’s the role in the movement of, you know, galvanizing people and getting them on board the movement. And then there’s a structural kind of change or structural work that we can also do as designers, right? So if you are in UI or UX, you could be bringing in principles of trauma-informed design from the start, or, you know, principles around accessibility.

You’re bringing that into the work and you’re making sure that bad design doesn’t go out at all. So I, think both in making the movement of people, and then just looking at the individual issues and trying to just break them apart and get rid of them, there’s a lot that we can do as designers and I was prepped for that question because my students ask me this all the time when we did that social studies class.

They’re like, so what can I do as a designer to change the world? And I’m like, it doesn’t matter if it’s big change or small change, we can all do something.

Jesse: Fantastic. Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, thank you so much.

Lesley-Ann: Thank you so much for this invitation.

Peter: Oh our pleasure.

How can people find you, engage with you?

Lesley-Ann: So LinkedIn should pay me, but LinkedIn is the easiest. The easiest place to find me is actually LinkedIn. Yes, all of social media, LinkedIn and Instagram are easy, but LinkedIn is the best place to locate me. And then I mean my email address is somewhere on OCAD website, but it is lnoel at ocadu dot ca and people can respond.

I’m actually slower on email, but I’m available and accessible to people.

Peter: And anything you want to plug?

Lesley-Ann: So I am, I, I could plug my book.

Peter: Please do.

Lesley-Ann: I’m the author of Design Social Change, because I really have been having these conversations about agency and seeing the world around us and understanding what needs to be changed and then taking action around that change. So I’ll, I’ll definitely plug that.

And I’ll also say to people, if you’re in Toronto, come and visit OCAD. ‘Cause we are in a really cool building downtown Toronto. So even if you just come and take a picture in front of the building, come and do that. Yes.

Jesse: Thank you so much for being with us.

Lesley-Ann: Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz. com and jessejamesgarrett. Com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.