The education of the social designer

The proliferation of Higher Education (HE) programmes of study in the broad area of social design highlights the instructional challenges of how to educate the social designer. The evolution of HE programmes of study in this academic area has developed without agreed-upon criteria. It is characteristic, however, of social designers’ working practices that they deal with complexity that often requires multiple stakeholder participation and cross-disciplinary knowledge. It is a challenging task to strike the right educational balance to provide the appropriate skills. The unpacking of instructional trends in social design programmes of study can provide a stepping-stone to further elaborate on the education of the social designer, and this is the aim of this paper. Through a textual analysis of forty-two (42) programmes of study in social design in thirteen (13) different countries, this paper explores emerging instructional themes with a particular focus on competencies, entry criteria, programme content, teaching and learning and assessment, and it identifies curriculum design innovations.