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Having demonstrated the increasingly important role of design in the Silicon Valley “ecosystem of innovation,” we turn in this chapter to the academic institutions that have, over the last 60 years, assumed the task of training the next generation of designers. In order to explore alternative and competing approaches, it examines the philosophies of design education as they evolved in the context of an engineering school at an elite research university (Stanford), a public university with a populist mandate (San Jose State), and an art school (California College of the Arts). In each institution designers had to fight to establish the legitimacy of their curricula against the more established traditions of the fine arts, the applied arts, and the science-based engineering disciplines.

This chapter examines how champions of entrepreneurial citizenship remake education, proposing that the skills of producing innovation and the skills of taking civic action are one and the same. These educational reforms promise that “every child” can be an entrepreneur. This model appears democratic in that it expands merit or success beyond narrow visions that locate merit at the apex of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or global corporations. At the same time, it naturalizes privilege and resources as leadership and passion. Entrepreneurial citizens appear simultaneously as empathic leaders of entrepreneurs' others and as portraits of what all Indians ought to become. Those who do not lead India, implicitly, should follow. Design in Education, in its optimism and its pitfalls, offers a view into the limits of entrepreneurial citizenship. This form of citizenship promised a model of change, but it also was a new mechanism for development without disturbing existing social orders.

This chapter examines the role that kinaesthetic knowing played at the Bauhaus, even after the epistemological principle had fallen out of favor elsewhere. László Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee used instruments, methods, and techniques borrowed from experimental psychology. Primary amongst these were techniques of introspection. Especially within the basic design course (Elementarunterricht, Vorkurs, Vorlehre, or Grundkurs), the first-year course that dismissed the boundaries between the applied and the fine arts and posited formal manipulation as the basis of all artistic activity, design was defined as a process whereby haphazard self-observation was disciplined with the help of rigorously defined procedures. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the Bauhaus curriculum diagram drawn by the school’s founder and first director Walter Gropius. By the time that the school moved from Weimar to Dessau and was incorporated into the German university system, the school had abandoned the transdisciplinary ideal suggested by Gropius’s diagram and implemented a curriculum encouraging specialization. Even though the school’s initial claim that design education was the quintessential educational model for modernity was abandoned, the formalist techniques that were developed there would become the backbone of design education in the twentieth century.

This chapter addresses the near absence of design education in K-12 schools and how it often reflects the myth of the creative genius in modern society. The chapter explores work by several creative people and how they cultivated that creativity and the courage to deploy it. It offers a vision of a redesigned K-12 education that teaches students diverse intelligences and offers a more creative approach to the STEM fields.