In his wonderful book ‘Imagine If‘ Ken Robinson talks about the flaws within the educational system.
He argues that what students need from their education is to become proficient in some core competencies in order to prepare them for the economic, personal, cultural and social challenges they will face in their lives.
The competencies he identifies are curiosity, creativity, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure and citizenship.
Here’s how Ken breaks them down in his book :
Curiosity – the ability to ask questions and explore how the world works
Creativity – the ability to generate new ideas and apply them in practice
Criticism – the ability to analyse information and ideas and to form reasoned arguments and judgements
Communication – the ability to express thoughts and feelings clearly and confidently in a range of media and forms
Collaboration – the ability to work constructively with others
Compassion – the ability to empathise with others and to act accordingly
Composure – the ability to connect with the inner life of feeling and develop a sense of personal harmony and balance
Citizenship – the ability to engage constructively with society and to participate in the processes that sustain it
I’ve often thought about what being a good designer actually means and I think that these competencies would be a brilliant framework to use to help work that out in practice.
When I think about the best people I’ve worked with I realised that it is these things that they’ve been really good at.
As a designer being good at the tools and methods is one thing but if you don’t have these competencies then you’ll struggle.
They aren’t just relevant to designers of course, but feel really useful to help us to recruit people, set objectives and design our own training and development.
I would wholeheartedly recommend Ken’s book, it covers many other fascinating and important subjects such as creativity, positivity, sustainability and systems thinking.
The get a feel for his work check out his TED talk on ‘Do schools kill creativity‘.