Why We’re Designing With Prospective Students in Public
At AC4D, designing in public is not just about transparency. It’s a core pedagogical tenant to how we teach and practice craft. Particularly through the lens of complex, wicked problems like food insecurity, affordable housing, or healthcare to name a few, challenging problems must be solved in the visible world. We define the practice of designing in public as:
- Externalizing Your Thoughts: Make your ideas public so that you are forced to confront the complexity of your research, inviting critique and discourse. This prevents falling in love with a hidden idea that hasn’t been tested in the real world.
- Taking a Public Stance: Move beyond a neutral observation and use design as an act of advocacy. Committing to a public perspective that could be received controversially is vulnerable, but important to becoming accountable to the people and communities being designed for rather than just a client or boss.
- Getting Out of the Building (and go talk to real people): The people you’re designing for are experts in their own lived experiences. Leaving the comfort of your own knowledge and assumptions rejects the idea of doing research without including the population that would be affected by the solution.
- Starting Before You’re Ready: Doing work in public embraces putting low-fidelity, incomplete ideas into the world early to combat perfectionism, invite failure, and create opportunities for more authentic feedback through visible iterations.
Intentionally Building AC4D’s Next Chapter
Founded in 2009, AC4D has graduated 100 alumni, practitioners who are autonomous changemakers in whatever journey they embark on next. It only made sense to turn exactly what we teach onto ourselves, changing and evolving our programs to meet the needs of the next generation of changemaking UX practitioners.
To kickstart this evolution, AC4D commissioned a UX research study late last year conducted by Elizabeth Turnell, to understand what UX practitioners actually need from education in the future as AI reshapes the field. You can read her full article on the research here.
It is not a surprise that AI is reshaping how designers think, learn, and work, and current learning models aren't keeping up. Talking to practitioners navigating their careers and craft practice to continue their development surfaced key nuances of what design education should consider to support the future development of practitioners in this field. From her research, we learned:
- Designers are turning to AI more than each other, eroding the collaborative thinking that defines good design.
- Designers are guessing their way through ethical AI use with no clear guidance. Their lack of technical fluency makes those decisions riskier.
- Self-paced learning falls short because designers can't reliably judge the quality of their own work without guided feedback and critique.
- Design education hasn’t been teaching the workflow skills employers actually hire for.
These learnings created a moment for reflection for AC4D as we considered what we want to be for the next generation of UX professionals. We zoomed out to re-examine more than just a single program, pausing to look at the whole of AC4D as a venture. Tapping into an outside perspective, Ada Ryland facilitated the application of the Venture Design framework to how we looked at four key areas:
- Customer Model: Who specifically are we designing for, and what job are they hiring a program to do?
- Market Model: Where does AC4D fit in a landscape crowded with bootcamps, self-paced courses, and graduate level university programs?
- Business Model: How does AC4D deliver this value in a way that is sustainable to operate and accessible enough for working professionals to afford?
- Financial Model: When we identify what is both sustainable and accessible, what does it actually cost to get there?
By examining the market, we dove into the factors are shaping the broader system our AC4D exists in and heard more about how these factors are impacting real practitioners:
Bootcamp Graduates - Between 2021 and 2022, UX bootcamps expanded rapidly, creating a large wave of practitioners entering the field at roughly the same level and time. These bootcamps focused on getting students through the professional door at a high volume, teaching the methods, tools, and language students need to create a portfolio, interview, and land a job. Just three to four years later, the conditions that provided an accelerated path from program to job to next job in a market that no longer exists today.
- "My first couple of UX research jobs felt so incredibly easy to get compared to what's happening right now." — Ellen, UX Researcher
Career Ladder Bottleneck - To continue their trajectories, practitioners currently in the more junior to midlevel positions are faced with a ceiling that is invisible to everyone around them and need education models that de-emphasize tool mastery even in the age of AI.
- “I've been struggling to actually measure my own success. There are some small things that have shown me that I've moved up in my development, but they're not as tangible as what I was used to.” - Guillermo, UX Researcher
Strategic Skill Gap - Organizations and our world’s hardest problems need strategic, critical thinkers. The opportunities to facilitate building this capacity are severely lacking in the structured practice needed to develop the judgment and intuition that can’t be generated or gained by waiting for the right project to come along.
- "Senior level to me is when you're being tapped for strategy. You're not just a pair of hands. You're helping scale the company, not just doing the mundane stuff." — Nancy, UX Researcher
Researching Career Advancement in UX & the Student We’re Designing For
Historically, the AC4D student of years past has predominantly been a career changer. Someone who self-identified as a “misfit” or yearned for the desire to make things as much as they drove the strategy behind it. The student we’re designing for next isn’t a beginner. They’ve started their careers as a UX practitioner and have already gained 3-7 years of experience in the field.
We believe they’re someone who feels trusted to execute, but have fewer opportunities to give direction to or shape ambiguous, high-visibility work. To learn who they really are, we conducted qualitative research with 10 mid-level UX practitioners (product designers, researchers, service designers, and a conversational AI designer). Our key research objective was to understand career progression challenges and further define the learning gaps UX practitioners are faced with at this stage of their careers.
These practitioners are confidently trusted with the ‘what’ they’re making, but haven’t yet fully led the why, finding themselves in a multi-layered trap that challenges both lateral progression in their current environment and movement within the market:
- Self - I know I have the potential, but don’t have the forum to prove it.
- “I'll volunteer for most anything. Just, you know, if I see the need or kind of like I can give feedback on something, I'll say, you know, hey, I see this gap or whatever, like I'm happy to try it or I can do XYZ. And sometimes they take me up on it.” - Norah, UX Researcher & Ops Specialist
- Employer - I'm doing or have done senior level work but no one around me calls it that yet.
- “I have kind of teetered that way in certain areas since I was the only researcher… I think I was kind of acting as a senior, but I only got to do it for a couple months before I was laid off.” - Elle, UX Researcher
- Market - I’m capable of being more senior, but the market isn’t acknowledging that I am.
- "When applying for jobs I was like all this translation of jargon. We may not have collected the metrics that they want, but you still have to say you were contributing to sales growth or whatever. Just trying to make sense of the market and positioning myself as a transferable, relevant, hireable designer." -Millie, Service Designer
The First Iteration of What We’re Building
The core value proposition compresses what typically takes 5–7 years of happenstance into 4–10 months of intentional, structured practice through the lens of socially complex problems. In a small group of 12-15 working professionals at 10-12 hours per week (4 in class hours plus outside course work), students would gather remotely for live instruction. We tested this program through this prototype of the program.
On the learning structure: “I think having these projects that are very specific, like we want to make sure you're getting the skills to go down the senior track, that [the course work] is helpful to intentionally push me down that lane. Versus at my company and the projects I'm on, sometimes I'm like, is this helping me on my career advancement or is this just: you needed a person with the Figma account?" - Wyatt, UX Designer
On the format: “Being able to work with others, especially in any type of live setting, that's a huge value. Most of my personal advancements in my career have been through people that I knew who I'd worked with and knew the kind of experience, or had some kind of experience and rapport with me and ended up recommending me to another job." - Perry, UX Designer
On community: "Being a sole researcher, I have one problem, and the problem is that I don't have feedback from other people. I don't see other people doing what I do with the type of users that I work with." - Guillermo, UX Researcher
While participants found the program’s existence to be valuable overall, the focus solely on future-oriented outcomes didn’t make anyone eager to make a commitment right away.
- The credential wasn't well-explained: Multiple participants asked directly: "What is this certificate, who recognizes it, and where does it sit between a bootcamp badge and a master's degree?"
- Pricing without proof: Price wasn't a dealbreaker for most and employer support would make a difference, but it required more evidence of career outcomes from people like them.
What surprised us: When participants expressed what they were demoralized by in the state of the job market and UX as a professional field overall, they were also the most articulate about what they actually needed. They need a safe proving ground that meets them at their place of discouragement, not just aspiration.
A key design principle that emerged: Learning disconnected from immediate, concrete opportunity will be resisted in a market where every extra move has to quiet fear more than it gives hope.
Up Next
We’ve taken our findings from this first round of testing into our next iteration to help us better understand if we’re better supporting the development of a practitioner’s professional identity such as their point-of-view, not just career mechanics.
If you’re a UX practitioner that wants to help shape the future of design education, we’re always recruiting our next participant.
Big thank you to all the alumni, faculty past and present, and UX practitioners who have contributed to getting us here.
