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