The problem with fake design projects - and what we can do about that

Advise to aspiring young designers: stop doing fake projects. Putting yourself into imaginary business situation with fictional users and personnas will do little good for you. In my opinion, doing fake projects is a wasted time.

This trend started with design bootcamps. The typical design bootcamp project starts by assigning the fictional business case to the designer, usually in the area of food delivery or real estate business (make new and beter Airbnb!) or inventing a new taxi application.

Yet another food delivery app

Yet another food delivery application. Yet another taxi booking system. Yet another real estate renting platform.

I wonder why course authors chose such boring tasks, the problems that already solved by many great designers before? Why don't the course authors be more creative, and give some interesting tasks, such as reinventing digital classroom system, or helping elderly people explore new theatre performances, or reduce waiting in hospitals ? How about helping small business moving their offers from offline to online? Or take any area of accessibility and improve it? These are all real world problems, not fictional ones.

If the young designer do not have ideas for real-world products, I recommend doing product teardowns instead. Take any product on the market and reverse engineer it. Investigate it. Find out what were decisions and compromises made during product construction. What was designers intention. What was her thought process.

Product teardowns are part of the regular practice of the professional designer. It's done intensively during competitive research, as a part of a design project preparation. So doing it as a ritual will provide a double benefit to young designers: they will develop a "thinking eye" for design details and recognize design excellence; they will sharpen their analytical skills and improve their critical thinking.

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