d.Code was my final, self-initiated masters project. Design has moved on from a discipline focused on functionality and aesthetics to one that “links creativity and innovation” (Cox, 2015). More and more companies are seeing the value that design can bring to a corporation and thus more job opportunities for design graduates have been created. In this context, I was interested in the skillset that design students gain from their studies, how they transition into the world of work and explore how the current services that they use to help them to define themselves as practitioners can be improved. This project was exhibited as part of the Glasgow School of Art Graduate Degree Show.

I continued my research with interviews of graduates and students from design courses, academics that teach within the school of design and employers. The purpose of these interviews were to identify what kind of professions designers can enter, their skillset, understanding of industry requirements and how industry values their skillset.

This research led to the conclusion that designers gain a wide variety of skills through their higher education that can be applied across many disciplines, however they face difficulty in finding these opportunities as many job sites rely on keywords and job titles to present the user with options and not the user’s actual skillset. Companies create jobs in response to their needs and it can be hard to keep up with all of the new titles these jobs are given and find out what skillset can be used for these new jobs. Furthermore, I found that there is a contrast between how design is viewed within an academic environment and that there needs to be a more open dialogue about the skillset that design graduates come away with from academia and how those can be applied within a workplace environment.

The response to these findings is d.Code, a digital service that helps graduates of design schools identify their skillset and use that to identify relevant job opportunities for them. It would also give employers a better understanding of how these student’s skillsets and how that may contribute to their company. During the design process I held a workshops with design graduates to get feedback on the concept and the way their skillset was visualised. Later on in the development process, I gained positive feedback from careers advisors at Skills Development Scotland on the structure of the service and on the digital touch point of the service.

The way the service would work is illustrated through an Axure prototype which can be accessed here.