Michael O’Donnell & Naadiya Mills
On the heels of announcing Working Not Working as a founding partner of Useful School, the world’s first pay-what-you-can online design school for people of color, we spoke with founder Ritesh Gupta for a quick course on where design education has fallen short, how he’s building Useful School’s curriculum with common sense, his own experiences, and peer review, and why a recalibration of design education will have a lasting impact on the design industry.
Where is design education falling short?
Where to start.
First, there’s a lack of awareness around design even being an option as a career, especially for BIPOC talent. As Ritesh shared in a Zoom call in February, “I grew up not really knowing about the creative fields. There's a joke among a lot of Asian Americans that you can either be a doctor, an engineer, or a failure. [At UCLA], I wasn't really even aware that these types of disciplines or creative opportunities existed. And even if I was, I wouldn't have seriously thought that I could make a living doing it, and it could make the impact that it could.”
One of the early missions of Useful School is to build the resources to create that awareness for students even at the high school level, and for their parents or whoever would be financially supporting them. “Here's the salary you can make. Here are some different paths you can take based on your personality and interests. Here's something you can actually share with your parents.”
Once you cross the obstacle of awareness, you trample the obstacle of interest. Ritesh received hundreds of applicants within the first 24 hours of announcing Useful School on LinkedIn.
Useful School’s pay-what-you-can model bypasses another common obstacle in design education: the cost for graduates facing about $200,000 in debt and predatory loans.
Post-graduation, doubts about whether your education will ultimately pay off rise to the surface, especially when faced with the current realities: there are deficient numbers of people of color within both junior and leadership positions, specifically the top-level roles where you are actually making the calls and advocating for budgets. Those who overcome the obstacles to break into the industry quickly step into experiences of discrimination and momentum stalls.
Ritesh Gupta, the Founder of Useful School
Building a Curriculum Through Common Sense
Useful School is built to navigate these realities by simultaneously teaching students what they would learn in a design school, but also focusing on the stuff that design schools typically don't. “That includes everything from how to handle yourself and deal with imposter syndrome as a person of color, how to answer recruiter emails, and how to advocate for yourself when someone commits a microaggression.”
The homework that students do is also designed to actually land on their portfolios. There's very little theory. This is stuff that you're actually going to be able to implement, regardless of your level of experience and current employment status.
Ritesh knows from his own experiences with discrimination in the industry that developing confidence is an absolutely vital component of learning for his students, the vast majority of whom are Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous.
“We're encouraging folks to position themselves as design leaders by taking on additional pieces of the puzzle that are traditionally not available to them and saying, ‘Hey, I want to volunteer. I'm raising my hand. I want to be part of this part of the project. Bring me in earlier in the process so I can help advocate for myself.’ So that way designers aren't just turning out PSDs all day long.
We're working with the students to make sure that they have a really strong sense of purpose and that's realized through their work. When they're working with future clients or design leaders, or they’re having issues, they know that Useful School is there for them, but they also have the proof on their portfolio or on a deliverable.”
Building Confidence Through Community
Ritesh sees Useful School not only as a classroom but also as a community. That’s an important element of sustaining confidence and advocacy that will have lasting effects on the creative industry. The curriculum cultivates the kind of supportive and collaborative spaces that are in short supply in the corporate setting, which fuels the confidence to bring that to the workplace. In effect, a useful school breeds a useful industry.
The application of this kind of confidence and the kinds of skills that students are learning under Ritesh’s stewardship has significant implications for the creative industry’s DEI progress as well. “We work with a population that's typically not seen at other schools or other professional development programs.” This is the type of diversity and inclusion that has historically been confined to the design research process, interviewing excluded individuals and communities as part of a journey map exercise or empathy exercise, bringing the “findings” back, and running with them.
Ritesh is incredibly thoughtful, resourceful, and diligent with how he’s building the Useful School curriculum. “First, I thought back to my younger self and said, okay, what were the actual deliverables or actual things I needed to learn to get my first product design gig or to help me build my own app. I would have to build a portfolio website that looked somewhat cool. I would have to have some case studies to prove that I can do the work.”
A System of Two-Way Support
Next, for more inspiration, input, and support, he sought out the feedback of industry leaders like Oriel Davis-Lyons, who runs The One School with The One Club for Creativity, Forest Young, and Mitzi Okou from Where Are the Black Designers?, who Ritesh currently volunteers for.
“‘What do you think about this curriculum? What would you add? What would you remove as a working professional in your experience? What are the things that you feel like should be necessary?’”
It was important to Ritesh that he seek advice from non-product designers. “The worst thing that I could do is pretend that product designers are only going to be working by themselves and going to answer to no one. That's not how reality is. They're going to have to work with engineers and are going to have to work with other product designers. They're going to have to work with marketing folks. Making sure that the curriculum was well-rounded is really important.”
Now, alongside communities of design educators who Ritesh has on speed dial, it’s the students at Useful School who are providing real-time feedback to inform the curriculum. In fact, the personalization, 1-on-1 instruction, and generally collaborative spirit are a large part of what makes each student’s education here so useful.
“The combination of all these voices from various angles and lived experiences all helped generate what you see today on the website.”
The school that Ritesh is creating is one that he and so many designers, specifically BIPOC designers, wish they had when they were younger. To be able to call on somebody to say, “Hey, like I just got an offer from a recruiter. What do I do?”
“Being able to be on call is a thing that I have always wanted from somebody else. And I'm in a fortunate position to be able to now take those calls.”