Ponder this for a second: How different would HBO's Silicon Valley be if the main character Richard had been a designer instead of a programmer?
The choice to feature a bumbling, awkward coder is illustrative of the greater Silicon Valley ecosystem, but it ignores a growing trend: Designers are playing an increasingly important role in leading startups and businesses.
Granted, the number of designers-turned-founders is still comparatively small, but a new incubator/school called 30 Weeks, is hoping to change that. The program is a collaboration between Google, The Cooper Union, education company Hyper Island and top-notch design schools including School of Visual Arts, Parsons and Pratt.
Starting this September, 20 designers will enroll in a 30-week program, working out of a co-working space in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood in hopes of turning their ideas into full-fledged, scalable businesses. Sound cool? Good, because they’re still accepting applications until June 20.
>All of the “professors” will be players in the design and tech scene.
You can think of 30 Weeks as a hybrid of a design school and a traditional tech incubator. Participants will pay $10,000 for the program, but that cost comes with an important footnote. “Designers all come out of the program owning 100 percent of their IP, and that’s very different from a lot of other incubator programs,” says Vivian Rosenthal, Founder-In-Residence at 30 Weeks and founder of augmented reality platform Snaps. “That’s part of the reason why the students are paying a tuition.”
The program, designed with input from the design schools, is about action, not lectures. “Designers will focus on their products from day one,” says Rosenthal. But they’ll also go through two to four-week modules where they do deep dives on different areas like design, technology, product and business development. All of the “professors” will be players in the design and tech scene.
For example, during the technology module, designers will partner up with engineers from NYC’s The Flatiron School, who will help them work through any technical issues they might be having. Ideally, says Rosenthal, after the module designers will know what they’re looking for in a co-founder or CTO, and will have a better understanding of what it will take to make the tech side of things happen with their product. Likewise, a partnership with Betaworks will help designers finesse their products, while a Behance co-founder will give input on its design.
In Rosenthal’s view, something like 30 Weeks has been a long time coming. Design-thinking has increasingly become a prized skill set in many technology companies, and design grads are starting their own hugely successful companies like Joe Gebbia at Airbnb, Matias Corea at Behance and Evan Sharp at Pinterest. “Creative thinkers and creative problem solvers are incredibly good at imagining and envisioning the future, as such they’re really good at creating it,” she says. “We all felt if designers had the chance to help shape the products and platforms of the world, that these products and platforms would be better off for it.”
Rosenthal is quick to clarify that 30 Weeks isn’t a replacement for traditional school. Rather, it’s a rethinking of education and what it means to build a skill set that will be immediately applicable in the real world. After all, good design is about making sure you’re equipping the user (in this case, students) with what they need to succeed. “Thinking about the user first will lead to some exciting things. We don’t know what those are going to be; this is an experiment,” she says. “We’re not trying to claim we know what’s going to come out of this, but what we can say is that we need to start not just building for today, but building for the future.”
