What will the designer of 2015 look like?

AIGA has found six major trends that it thinks will define the designer’s role during the next five years. They are much broader than simply the making of beautiful and useful things. They are:

1. Wide and deep: meta-disciplinary study and practice. Designers must be able to work in a broad range of disciplines, going against the BFA/MFA trend.
2. Expanded scope: scale and complexity of design problems. Designers should be able to anticipate problems; be proactive instead of merely reactive. Complex problems call upon designers to provide clear solutions.
   Designers must be able to work in a broad range of disciplines
3. Targeted messages: a narrow definition of audiences. Designers will have to deal with messages that will move toward ever more special interests, meaning they will need to design for both globalization and cultural identity.
4. Breakthrough: an attention economy. Attention is going to become scarcer during the next five years and designers will have to better understand what drives audiences.
5. Sharing experiences: a co-creation model. Designers will have to change their treatment of the audience or customers and treat them as co-creators of the message.
6. Responsible outcomes: focusing on sustainability. Designers must become leaders in our world of increasingly limited resources. They must take care with resources and avoid the extraneous. Ethical issues must meet design solutions.

It is all part of a report on design education that will better prepare designers of the future. For more, information, check out the full report here.

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