Despite the growing popularity of business-oriented product design education programs, it seems that many design curricula approach product design more like a formula for a market with nothing but a bottom line, with no real social context or problem in mind to solve. I came across this satirical and shockingly accurate comic entitled “The Product Design Process: A Graphic Novel” by MIT grad Alison Wong. The illustrated e-book plays out a semester of a typical product design studio, and inadvertently raises some interesting issues about design education:

What responsibilities do design educators have to set humanitarian and real-world contexts as starting points for design problems? Why do so many design studios lack actual socially-based design problems as starting points for thoughtful student projects? How important is the business case and marketability of a product? Are marketability and helpful, humanitarian products mutually exclusive entities? Is this an educational or industry-based problem?

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