Vuong Tong is the Head of Wix Playground Academy, a 3-month long summer web design program happening in NYC.

Creative people, just like everyone, learn through play.

Play has accompanied me throughout my career, even as early as the first design job I received after school at a boutique design firm. There my role was multifaceted, and I gained both design and business skills, like client management, honing craft, developing a brief, and producing high quality work. After a few years, I developed a deeper interest in solving bigger and more complex challenges, especially those related to business. To apply my design thinking skills and develop business skills, I returned to school to study innovation management. There, I collaborated with classmates from diverse backgrounds like fashion, branding, business, finance, and engineers. Projects were focused on solving business challenges using a multidisciplinary approach in order to deliver both strategic and design solutions.

After graduation, I took a design manager role at an innovation consultancy where I managed a team of designers across various disciplines from packaging, to branding, to motion graphics, to web, working together to visualize innovative near-future products and services. I often needed help on projects and hired freelancers. I reviewed portfolios from recent graduates to experienced designers, and could see a clear difference. Young designers had well-researched projects while experienced designers had more real-life design projects with a developed consistent look and feel. However, I saw that experienced designers’ work seemed less playful and experimental. This made me question how the practice of play could be reinforced to students earlier and sustained throughout their career. What could I do to positively impact them?

I saw a chance for education to be much more experience-based and experimental when I took the opportunity to develop the Wix Playground Academy, a web design education program. Students could work on real-life briefs but had the freedom to find their passion and develop whatever they desired. However, I had to really research into what schools were teaching and not teaching students.

From material to immaterial and more

To complement what students learn in school, I looked at how schools and the design industry started, evolved, and coexisted. The beginning of the design profession was focused around aesthetics, craft and form. The expectation in design school was to learn and master foundational 2D and 3D visual design skills - the same foundation classes I took the first year of university. As mass industrialization developed, careers like industrial design and product design emerged to meet production demands. Those disciplines focus on the physical processes and manipulation of materials.

The shift from physical to digital was accelerated by technology that ushered more sophisticated processes focusing on user experience. Experiences delivered through digital technology like “streaming, cloud processing, machine learning, and augmented and virtual reality challenged traditional notions of information as something material, ‘fixed’ in time and space” as Meredith Davis from the AIGA highlights. Designers are now expected to manage environments that are fluid, responsive, and highly dynamic. In today’s projects, designers must find the balance between 2D, 3D, and dynamic modes of thinking for everything from packaging design to environmental design to website touchpoints. Davis highlights that “even work in branding must question traditional strategies built largely for businesses that make physical products and an earlier environment in which designers could control where and when identity elements were seen.”

Craft ←----------------------X------> Strategic

Don’t just think - create.

With my work experience in delivering projects under limited time and resources, I understand that increasing complexity begets more complexity. Likewise, in building the curriculum, every component of the web design program is clearly purposeful but contextual. I want to make sure that skills are built upon each other and reinforce the learning objectives. I constantly ask myself, “Does it confuse or build?” If there’s any activity that doesn’t serve a purpose, it is superfluous, and is not included. It is analogous to how sculptors use subtractive processes by removing excess clay or chipping away at the stone until the intentional form emerges from the raw material.

As context is important for me to teach web design in a holistic manner, I looked at an example from Wendy Woon, a professor who runs the department of education at the Museum of Modern Art on how structure can create spaces for play. In the book The Art of Gathering, Woon describes the first day of class where she places the chairs in a messy pile at the center of the room. As students arrive, they are confused as to what to do and have to figure it out themselves. As time passes, students take the chairs down one by one and arrange it in a manner they think it needs to be. “By doing one simple thing—setting up the chairs in that crazy tangle — [Woon] makes the place an embodiment of her purpose… [that a] design of social space, physical space, and emotional space affects how people engage with ideas, content, and each other.”

I was inspired by her intent in creating an ambiguous but closed and safe space to play. At the Wix Playground Academy, each activity activates and creates spaces for students to explore theory, practice, divergent thinking, convergent thinking, physical, virtual, craft, strategy, learning, and play.

Creating what’s missing

I review at least 800 design student portfolios each year to select students for the program. I see portfolios as indicators of a student’s strengths and weaknesses. Yet portfolio after portfolio, I often see long paragraphs explaining research and design strategies rather than strong visual design solutions. I understand the importance of research and justifying why the design solution is a certain way. However, I honestly feel that they are difficult to navigate and understand from a browseable perspective. If the brief was explained through a thorough written explanation without visual communication to quickly clarify their solution, the portfolio might be easily dismissed. Here, storytelling and visual design could be used together to engage viewers and evoke intrigue, all while accurately explaining.

I believe that the disconnect between storytelling and visual design stems from lack of opportunities and practice for students to explain their work not only to their peers but also potential employers. From my personal experience in school, learning an ever-expanding set of design disciplines while preparing for the marketplace was wrought with high expectations. I had to deliver my best work under limited and compressed time. I felt at the start of my education, I was meant to broadly explore various design disciplines in hopes of discovering what I really wanted to do. Then I had to focus on a specialization and develop it to the highest degree. It’s a closed system environment where projects take theory and practice in a classroom setting. In retrospect, that type of career development didn’t sound like fun to me.

For added pressure, I also see an expectation for the students to have an all-encompassing approach to problem solving as today’s design problems are “wicked in that they are poorly defined and with ever-expanding scope,” as highlighted by the AIGA’s Introduction to Design Futures report. Yet, delivering a strategic rationale is not the same as delivering a visual design solution. Designer Gadi Amit expresses his frustration with candidates who have “impressive academic credentials [but] don’t add up to the basic skills required in a junior designer.” I agree with him that students need to develop an ability to explain their solutions in a clear and compelling way and most often it’s through visual design. I feel that this is not only integral, it is necessary to stand out in the market.

Do institutional systems prepare students for entering the market? Most often, the answer is yes. However there is a criticism as Hugo Rocha highlights in Paradigm Shift in Design Education, “the majority of design courses today are based on a pedagogical model which has been outdated for decades, defined by disciplines that do not communicate with each other.” At the end of the day, designers need to be able to both see and make things. If not, they can use strategy to solve a problem but are unable to execute it themselves and will lack the agency to both think and create. This is where the Wix Playground Academy can solve that problem.

Learn skills while incubating passion

Using real-life projects for students to practice what they learned in school gives students a taste of what skills they need to develop to succeed in the market. Students try to acquire that experience through internships that are meant to give them real life projects with real briefs and clients to work with. I see complementary design schools or design programs sprouting up like the d.school that are meant to enrich and complement existing skills. Rocha reiterates that “crossing disciplines is now a necessity.”

By being part of design educators and inspired by institutional knowledge, I want to be able to anticipate and serve the future needs and skills of designers by offering a platform to meet and develop necessary digital skills. As Davis reiterates, “curricula must be rethought from the ground up, not modified through endless additions to an industrial-age model.”

I believe students can learn through a holistic experience.

I want students to practice the web design process from defining a brief, referencing inspiration, sketching and then to a fully functional website. Students put theory into practice by participating in every step of the process guided by design mentors. The market is constantly in flux so we design projects and activities with a chance for designers to be agile, flexible, and resourceful.

I believe students should be aware about how to think.

Beyond teaching the web design process, I want students to consider what content, imagery, and video can do on the web combined with storytelling. On a metacognition level, I want students to understand that there are multiple approaches to solving a problem and not just one.

I want to show students that design is a way of life.

Design isn’t just a way to work, but it can also be a way to play. By having students host themed happy hours, visit museums, and listen to lectures from leading-industry designers, they will gain inspiration from the world and incorporate their experience back into their work.

I see the Wix Playground Academy as a partnership model with our students.

Not only do I have the opportunity to teach students about web design, but I work alongside them on the projects as a partner by their side. Rocha reminds me that students, “instead of mere information consumers, participate actively and become content and knowledge creators.” As I approach the third year of the web design program, I hope that this platform allows students a chance to learn through play and develop new skills and, as a result, invoke a sense of agency that they control and create their own futures.