Missing Lessons From
Design Education
June. 8. 2026
A few months ago, our team was asked to speak with students at RISD and Brown's Design Engineering program MADE, which looks like a fantastic Master's program. Partway through our chat, a student asked an insightful question: What skills do professional designers need that school often does not teach? The great news is that the design learning never stops after graduation.
Design education today offers more options than ever. Programs are increasingly interdisciplinary and technically advanced, attracting diverse talent. But building creative confidence, technical skill, critical thinking, and comfort with ambiguity remains a tall order. Yet all are essential in R&D.
At the same time, design schools face a real challenge. There simply isn’t enough time to cover the full scope of professional practice in craft, theory, technology, communication, and rapidly evolving tools. As a result, gaps are inevitable. Many early-career designers encounter aspects of product development they were never exposed to in school. Giving talks to a range of university design programs, a few themes have consistently emerged regarding this gap
Good design is not just about aesthetics or technical performance. It’s about value creation.Product Economics + User Psychology
Design is often described as a blend of art and engineering. It is both of those in practice, but it also exists within the realm of economics. Economics is broader than just its monetary definition, but that part is also important. At its core, economics comes down to understanding why we, as users, make decisions. Both about who we are and what we value, and sometimes quite different, is who we think we are. This can get a little squishy when it comes to understanding how we act, often rooted in a customer’s beliefs and norms. This part of economics feels as much like art as it is science, as it surrounds what drives our decision-making as users.
The monetary side is more cut-and-dry. There is a smattering of product acronyms and simple concepts that are easy enough to learn, but understanding their relationship to product development is key. For starters: BOM (Bill of Materials), FOB (Freight on Board), WTP (Willingness to Pay), Gross Margin, Amortization, etc. Even a high-level understanding of the basics equips creatives to better grasp the commercialization process.
What’s often missed in school is how business economics translates into design decisions and trade-offs. Products succeed or fail not only because of their process and output quality, but also because of how they deliver value to users, which includes balancing cost and perceived benefit. Good design is not just about aesthetics or technical performance. It’s about value creation.
Instead of focusing only on shaping or features, savvy creatives start asking: What problem is valuable enough that someone will pay for this level of solution? That shift from form or function-making to value-creating is often where design begins to influence business outcomes.
Design Ethics
Design education celebrates creativity and innovation, but ethical considerations are often treated as implied rather than explicitly taught. Turns out, it’s far from simple when you get into the detailed ramifications of what we think might be obvious.
Professional designers hold enormous influence on products and systems that shape behavior, consumption patterns, and environmental outcomes. Here are a few examples:
Product environmental impact
Supply chain decision implication
Accessibility and inclusion
Product lifespan and repairability
User autonomy and attention
Relevant product that respects incumbent competition
Tackling all of that list at once right out of school would be daunting. Thankfully, there is power in engaging these with concrete, small steps. We’ve been impressed by how helping think through each detail and its implications starts to stack up.
But it’s hard to get into these topics without first understanding context, trade spaces of pathways, adjacent examples, and alignment with business cases for a brand/company. The reality is we are all learning in real time. Each new project can leverage insights from previous ones or spark curiosity to go deeper into a specific topic. Experience helps develop a better point of view and understanding, but the early years of a career may leave a young designer with more questions than answers.
Making the right call in product development sounds simple, but it’s often complex. It comes down to having a sincere rationale, an understanding of risks involved, and where through lines exist with a customer base. Decision-making is also tied to industry and consumer awareness, relevant new technologies, an understanding of what consumers might consider acceptable, and how a product’s promise reinforces a brand’s position.
There is growing scrutiny around planned obsolescence, waste, and manipulative product and service engagement patterns. The leading companies are ahead of regulatory minimums because they embrace a considered approach. And as designers and engineers, we can help see where the rubber hits the road and support decisions with important implications.
Team Dynamics
We often see design work framed as digital and physical objects. But in reality, it is a discipline about human experience and behavior. Most successful products succeed because they offer a future experience that is aligned with how people naturally think and act in their current state, or are simple and intuitive to learn.
This begins to merge with the more traditional definition of product economics above, to better understand users and elevate market insights. But interestingly, it also applies to the human experience and behavior of those we work with who are driving the development process (that’s all of us!).
We benefit greatly from understanding how folks connected to the design process think. How we share and differ in personal priorities and what success looks like (for each of us) can deeply influence a project’s success. Part of being human is having our own mental models, securities, and insecurities, and being easier or harder to read.
Thinking through what the larger team and teammates need in their roles helps support a better process. It may mean more buy-in on a concept pathway because we are listening better. Or simply that a working relationship can evolve because we have a deeper understanding of each other.
Much of the design and development work is better served with a deeper form of empathy. Not just for the end user, but for all the teammates who are helping bring something to the world.
Design is a team sport, and it’s key to best understand all of one’s teammates.
Emerging Technology
We’ve found the profession to track to the classic adage of “Jack of all trades is a master of none, is often times better than a master of one”. Design is about practicing good generalism, but that generalism also evolves over time.
Plan for the platforms and tools you use to evolve, particularly as AI increasingly drives embedded empowerment in these tools. Clearly, these are already reshaping many design workflows.
In our experience, many of us are not on the same CAD platforms we used out of school. The way to thrive is through constant curiosity about new tools, improvements to existing ones, and open-mindedness toward different workflows.
This will remain dynamic in the chapters ahead. At its worst, it can be frustrating to be deep on a particular platform to see it twilight (RIP Flash). But at its best, it means we have to stay on our toes as professionals and continue to molt into better practitioners.
Some Final Thoughts
Design education provides an extraordinary foundation, and professional practice requires a broader toolkit. Understanding economics, ethics, psychology, and emerging technologies allows designers to move beyond the function-based and form-making decisions toward something much larger: creating products that drive meaningful value in the world.
For students entering the field, these topics may not always appear in a syllabus, but they are worth seeking out early. The most effective designers are rarely defined by the tools they use or their skillset fluency upon graduation. They are defined by how well they understand the larger systems, their teammates, and the markets in which their designs live.
Explore More Insights