I found the following quote on the ever-insightful blog of Frank Chimero. He is currently writing a book called The Shape of Design. I was too late to help fund it via KickStarter, but I hope that I can still buy it when it is finished. Here’s why:
The miseducation of a designer. If it’s wrong for a client to believe the value of design is in the nouns, it’s also incorrect to educate a designer around nouns. Curriculums shouldn’t be focused towards teaching software or creating specific artifacts. The education of a designer should not be focused towards working in specific mediums any longer, because those mediums change so frequently and often congeal into one another into new hybrids. Everything is a campaign now. Schools would be wise to focus activity around objectives rather than tasks, because so much of professional work is around objectives too: devising plans to fulfill those objectives, creating a symphony of efforts that work together towards that goal, and then executing those efforts in a way that adds value. By focusing on objectives, curriculum will age better because instructors can be agile about the tools that they teach as the world around the university changes.
— Frank Chimero, taken from Designer’s Poison