My initial and unedited response is that yes, I think the attitudes within the schools play a big part, and I think the schools that I have been associated with don’t do enough to encourage the students to think strategically about their work.

Certainly in my personal experience on the Coventry MA program, there were the makings of better “strategic thinking” teaching, with people like Nick Hull and Cherie Lebbon working to get students to see the bigger picture. There needed to be a bigger stick wielded however to encourage students to take it seriously.

Of course it also falls back on the students too, particularly at MA level, to see the benefit of the strategic approach. Sadly, there is the mentality that “my sketches have to be better than anybody else’s and that will make me successful”. Lots of those guys are now working as alias monkeys or aren’t in the industry at all…

In a sense it was lucky for me that my sketching wasn’t the best, far from it in fact, but it helped me to focus on an alternative route. As I’ve said previously, it’s sometimes a hard sell in the automotive industry, but I feel that times are about to change for the better and the schools need to prepare their students for this.

In other words, how do automotive designers learn to be strategic when they’re forced to spend night and day learning to sketch cars correctly? Is part of the reason the auto world has such a strong status quo because we don’t have enough people challenging it smartly?