This study looks at recent opinion shifts in design education theory and practice and illustrates how two innovative design educators are responding to significantly new contexts for design. These changes may well be the result of the current period of extreme uncertainty, many aspects of which are contributing to general public anxiety: environmental and social changes and international politics among them.

The paper investigates two educators’ responses to dealing with world uncertainty and change and thus falls into the conference’s general broad theme of ‘Tools’. New thinking and trends in the education of designers and design managers is examined. The authors take their existing programme curricula, philosophy and strategy as a starting point and discuss, in a dialogue, their ideas for answering the following questions:

How well are our current programmes responding to our changing world?

How may we change them in the near future with the objective of developing the best ways for preparing our students for the current and emerging local and global contexts?

The work of designers is now more universally pervasive and at the forefront of modern consumerism and yet the designer's traditional role is being re-appraised by society, clients and design practitioners themselves. Buchanan argues that designers need a new ‘Four Orders of Design’ in order to operate successfully in today’s world. Designers appear to have reached an important stage of public and corporate recognition, but at a level that may not adequately reflect their diverse range of activities and their true worth to society. Designers are now in a significantly enhanced position to lead.

Consider new publications that impact on the future of design activity both in practice and education: First, the discussion raging on the need for massive corporate organisational change described by Harvard’s Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin in their book “The Support Economy” (2002) as a current ‘transaction crisis’ between institutions, companies and consumers promotes the idea of a new and greater understanding of the needs of all stakeholders. Secondly, the management author, Rosabeth Moss Kanter in “Transforming Giants” describes multi-national corporations change from command and control conditions to widely shared values as a working community that stress openness, inclusion and, especially, making the world a better place. We may also consider the ecologist David Orr’s the Nature of Design through which deeper contexts and specification for design is expressed. Furthermore Ezio Manzini’s work in Design for the Everyday and Emude reveal transferable tools of social entrepreneurship capable of informing current design practice and education. Through this the emphasis on society becomes paramount.

The authors’ work emanates from differing backgrounds and experience. Naomi Gornick has developed masters programmes in design management now moving to investigations of corporate social responsibility and contextual ecological issues for designers and managers. Ian Grout, starting within traditional industrial design, moves towards the larger themes of design for society and ecology through working with products, services and systems in the context of designing for the human experience. Both have a desire to reflect on best directions. They both seek to move design from discipline specific to holistic, from relative certainty to better best-guessing, from the designer as individual to the designer as teamworker, from standard of living to quality of life.

Their chosen method of establishing a dialogue, for this paper, is in order to allow the conversation itself to develop its own direction, speculating on their own experience and intuition about possible futures, so that new knowledge evolves in a way that could not have been achieved otherwise.