Opening doors: Broadening designers' skill sets

Literature suggests that exposing future designers to knowledge from other disciplines is beneficial. We refer to these as ‘non-traditional’ skills. One such area is the social sciences; in this paper we will be focusing on this area. First we outline the reasons why design students should be exposed to discourse from the social sciences. We refer to these as ‘non-traditional’ design skills. We then describe an international project which illustrates how students were able to practice such skills alongside more ‘traditional’ design skills. We conclude by stating that although the project demonstrated the possibility of enabling future designers to practice both ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ (wider) skills at module level is a good start, we believe that such ‘wider skills’ should be strategically incorporated at programme level in order to scaffold them through the programme.