on a very fundamental level, we
have pretty much everything we
need... We no longer need to make
stuff in order to make money. We
can instead exchange information-based products” [ 1].
Rushkoff is describing a form of
personal self-sufficiency in which
everyone is a freelancer, everyone
is an entrepreneur, and everyone
is able to engage in productivity
when they want to and on their
own terms. If this is to become
true in contexts of design, students
graduating with a four-year degree
need to leverage a dramatically different, broader, and less specialized
skill set. A focus on basic accounting may trump digital pre-press;
understanding operations and
logistics may be more important
than color theory; and the ability
to task-switch may be more critical
than understanding kerning. If the
fundamental decision to special-ize does not go away entirely, the
specialization choices will need to
shift dramatically, to include skills
in services, systems, facilitation,
entrepreneurship, and policy.
Corporate or Consultancy?
As design students approach gradu-
ation, it occurs to them that they
need to get a job, and so they cre-
ate a portfolio of their work and
begin to shop it around to vari-
ous companies. A design portfolio
typically places emphasis on the
various things students have made
during their four years of college;
students who studied Web design
may include screenshots of the vari-
ous sites they have designed. When
I worked at frog design, I used to
receive dozens of unsolicited port-
folios via email in the months of
March, April, and May. In portfolio
classes, students learn to take often
ridiculous measures to stand out
from the crowd. Aspiring designer
Alec Brownstein created a custom-
ized website, pitching himself to
various creative directors—and
then purchased Google Ad Words for
each creative director by name, so
they would discover his page when