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Designers are entrusted with increasingly complex and impactful challenges. However, the current system of design education does not always prepare students for these challenges.

This paper is a follow up to DesignX, a position paper written in 2014, which introduced the design challenges of complex sociotechnical systems such as healthcare, transportation, and environmental protection.

Design education is changing rapidly in its content, its pedagogy, its students. Over the past decade or two, several developments have been at play. At the risk of oversimplifying matters, a caricature might best clarify these changes.

Throughout the modern history of design there were many design schools that tried to shape the field in one way or another. While some were experimental, others were grounded and had a very practical focus.

In this article I will present some of the conceptual tools I have come up with to try and deal with issues of scope, complexity, uncertainty, and change in design and design education.

In this article we argue that the field of design evolved to include helping organizations address complex problems in the face of uncertainty, but it has yet to build knowledge in a way that formalizes the various activities embraced by the field.

As design continues to evolve so does our approach at ID, especially toward our curriculum and the competencies we build in our students. Major institutional changes in 2017–18 prompted an in-depth analysis of and update to our largest graduate program, the Master of Design (MDes).

If the ecosystems that we are part of and rely on are to flourish, we must urgently transform how we live, and how we imagine living. Design education has a critical role to play in this transformation, as design is a materially engaged, world-building activity.

In this article, I outline the evolution of recommendations for graphic and communication design education towards professional trends and the competencies required for future professional practice. I will go on to define and discuss three areas of student growth that can respond to challenges within the university and changes in design practice: translation, creation, and articulation.

In this article, we argue that, in response to emerging societal, technology, and other global transformations, nine interrelated changes in the landscape of design are having an impact on design education in four principal areas: design practice, teaching arena, students, and pedagogy.

Designers have been interested in the relationship(s) between design theory, practice, and pedagogy ever since the field emerged as a scholarly discipline. In this article, we recount how we took a design theory originally developed for use in grassroots policymaking and redeployed it in the graduate classroom.