Raja Schaar on Nurturing Curiosity Over Craft
When we meet Raja Schaar online, she's calling in from her home office - though the sounds of family life and an energetic dog occasionally break through. It's a reminder that even in more formal conversations about the state of design, the real world insists on being present. And for Raja, that insistence on reality, on the messy complexity of actual human needs, runs through everything she does.
As an Associate Professor of Product Design at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Raja occupies a position that straddles multiple worlds: academia and practice, teaching and research, theory and community action. Her path into design began with exhibition design and museum education - work that taught her how to physicalize learning and tell stories through environments. Today her focus has shifted toward what she calls creating "a more just, equitable world through design," working directly with communities in West Philadelphia that design education has historically excluded. Her projects range from Black Girls STEAMing Through Dance to environmental stewardship programs with Latina students, all grounded in what she calls "culturally sustaining practices."
But it's in her teaching - design ethics, design futures, studio work - where she confronts a tension that defines this moment in the field. How do you prepare students for an industry that seems to want them fully formed from day one, yet constantly shifts what "designer" even means?
“We can only teach you so much in the four, five, six years that we have you (...) Once you go out into the real world, there is this level of complexity that knocks them in the face.”
When asked how well design education prepares students for today's realities, Raja pauses before answering. “On one level,” she says, “design as a creative practice hasn't changed. Human beings have always needed to solve problems, to move ideas from their heads into the world. The media shift - from stone tablets to Figma - but the fundamental act of iteration, feedback, and refinement remains constant. Schools can teach that. They can teach new tools, even AI, without much trouble.” Technical skills, she argues, are not the problem.
The challenge is something else entirely: the speed and complexity of the real world. In academic settings, timelines are controlled, feedback is structured, constraints are clear. But once students enter industry, the protection falls away. Products fail and end up in landfills. Digital tools carry hidden privacy concerns. Supply chains stretch across continents. The ripple effects are immediate, enormous, and often invisible until it's too late. "We can only teach you so much in the four, five, six years that we have you," Raja reflects. "Once you go out into the real world, there is this level of complexity that knocks them in the face."
What education can do, she insists, is teach resilience. Students need to learn how to learn, how to pivot quickly, how to stay curious when the ground shifts. The one constant, she says, is ambiguity. The world will keep changing in ways that don’t make sense until suddenly they do. Designers, she believes, will always be good at spotting opportunities to make things better, but they cannot be fixed in how they think that will happen. This is the mindset she tries to instill in her students, even as she acknowledges its limits. “We try to prepare students for that mindset,” she says, “but I don’t know if it’s possible to fully prepare them.”
This gap between education and industry has widened in recent years. Both Raja and her students have noticed a troubling pattern: entry-level positions have all but disappeared. Companies now demand seniors from day one. Junior roles, when they exist at all, are written as if they require a decade of experience. The market, in other words, wants designers who are already formed - no nurturing, no patience, no training.
Raja has watched which students succeed in this environment. For her, two types seem to navigate it well. The first are generalists with decent technical skills across the board but no single specialization. These students have spent their time developing a design philosophy, staying attuned to current events, and building depth in adjacent fields like social sciences or sustainability. They're open to anything: fashion, healthcare, space exploration. They don't cling to a fixed idea of what design should be. "If someone says, oh, there's a fashion position, they're like, I'll try it," Raja explains. "What? Learn new material. I learned all these other materials. This is not going to be hard."
The second type are mission-driven students who see design as a stepping stone toward something larger. They came to school wanting to make a difference in health, education, alternative energy, or climate. Design is just one skill in their backpack. They're not looking for design roles specifically; they're looking for opportunities in their chosen field. And because that larger purpose drives them, they pull in whatever tools they need - grants, fellowships, entrepreneurial ventures - without worrying whether the job title says "designer."
The students who struggle most, Raja notes, are those who arrive simply wanting to be designers. “I just want to make something that’s kind of cool,” they tell her. But, as she points out, the industry already has plenty of people who can polish a product or choose the right typeface. What it lacks, in her view, are leaders - project managers and collaborators who can navigate complexity and keep teams aligned. Those soft skills, she emphasizes - stakeholder management, strategic thinking, communication - matter more than ever. Students who specialize too narrowly, she adds, insisting on a single, fixed role, often wait longer for jobs or end up in unrelated industries because they weren’t able to adapt their story.
This brings us to discuss a broader frustration: the question of what actually distinguishes a designer. Raja acknowledges that craft matters. Someone who goes through a design process - iterating, testing, responding to feedback - produces work that's different from someone who simply makes things. That process can be trained. But she also resists the gatekeeping that suggests only certain people can access it. "Everyone in the world can be trained in a way of strategizing their own problem solving," she argues. In Raja’s view the tools and frameworks of design should be accessible to all, because the world has more problems than professional designers could ever solve alone.
“No one cares about how people experience products like designers do (...) No one thinks about the emotional connection, the cultural connection, the way it ties to people’s sense of self. But yet they treat us as if, once we’ve created some value, they no longer need us.”
At the same time, Raja is clear that democratizing tools doesn't erase expertise. Practice matters. Honing a craft matters. Just as everyone can learn the alphabet but not everyone becomes a writer, everyone can learn design methods but not everyone becomes a designer. The difference lies in the depth of engagement, the willingness to continuously refine, and the ability to self-critique. "There's a difference between making with design tools and being a designer," she says. "But I don't think it's as hard as we make it out to be."
Still, the industry's current instability - layoffs, rebrands, identity crises - leaves her somewhere between frustration and defiance. After 25 years in the field, Raja acknowledges the exhaustion of constantly having to convince people that they need designers. In her view designers are perpetually selling themselves, proving their value, in ways not required by other professions such as doctors or lawyers. "No one cares about how people experience products like designers do," she says. "No one thinks about the emotional connection, the cultural connection, the way it ties to people's sense of self. But yet they treat us as if, once we've created some value, they no longer need us."
The rebrand happening across UX and product design - teams calling themselves insights specialists, CX experts, business innovators - doesn't surprise her, but it does frustrate her. Students already struggle to find these fields in the first place. They want to combine creativity with analytical thinking, art with problem-solving, and they stumble into design almost by accident. Then they enter the workforce and can't even figure out what to search for on job boards. The instability of titles makes mentorship harder, career paths murkier, and the profession itself less legible to the outside world.
Her response, when she gets going, is fierce. "the world doesn't exist without us." She insists that “If all designers went on strike, nothing would get made, nothing would get built. Every product, every interface, every experience people rely on a daily basis wouldn't exist.” She recalls a commercial from years ago showing a day in the life without design: no mirror, no car, no way to navigate the chaos of modern life. "You can't imagine the inaccessibility of the entire planet without designers," she says.
“AI can generate images and polish interfaces. But it has no idea how something feels in the hand, how people actually navigate systems, what they need beyond surface aesthetics.”
She's equally skeptical of claims that AI will replace this work. “AI can generate images and polish interfaces. But it has no idea how something feels in the hand, how people actually navigate systems, what they need beyond surface aesthetics," she explains. If the industry decided it no longer needed designers and relied only on automation, Raja imagines a world frozen in place - like Cuba after the embargoes, where everything became a time capsule. "We'd be at a standstill," she says. "Everything would be falling apart. Everything would just be boring."
This conviction runs through her teaching. She wants students to understand that design is not a luxury or an add-on. It's foundational to how we live. And while the realities of employment are harsh - fewer junior roles, more competition, titles that keep shifting - the creative practice itself remains intact. People will always need to solve problems. They will always need to iterate, test, refine. The question is whether they approach that work with curiosity, empathy, and a willingness to ask hard questions.
“Rather than focusing on skills first, it really is about that mindset that can carry across any field. (...) Curiosity leads to empathy. It helps people move between disciplines, adapt to new technologies, and stay attuned to change. It’s what separates someone who can execute instructions from someone who can navigate complexity.”
If Raja could redesign one part of the ecosystem - education, industry, hiring, policy - she would focus on nurturing curiosity. Not teaching it, but nurturing it. She believes people are naturally curious, naturally capable of absorbing information and wanting to understand. But somewhere along the way, that curiosity gets flattened. Students are taught to comply, to follow existing processes, to stop asking why. Industry reinforces this. New hires are told to conform, not question.
“Rather than focusing on skills first, it really is about that mindset that can carry across any field. (...) Curiosity leads to empathy. It helps people move between disciplines, adapt to new technologies, and stay attuned to change. It's what separates someone who can execute instructions from someone who can navigate complexity.” But curiosity alone isn't enough if there's no safe space for it. Asking why in a new workplace shouldn't come off as just being critical. Leadership needs to be open to questions, open to critique, willing to hear that maybe the old way isn't the only way. Raja believes this shift needs to happen at every level: in how schools teach, in how companies operate, in how hierarchies are structured. "Compliance has not served us well as an industry," she says. "And it's really not going to serve the world well in the long term."
This ties into her larger hope for the field. She wants a new generation of designers who think metacognitively - who reflect on how they learn, how the industry functions, how their decisions ripple outward. She believes that if students develop that capacity, they'll be better equipped to shape what design looks like in ten or fifteen years. They won't need the predictable track of one title, one major, one company. They'll navigate ambiguity because they've learned to ask the right questions.
And beneath all of this is a quiet plea: make less stuff. Focus less on making money and more on making value. She knows it sounds idealistic, especially in the United States, where capitalism runs deep. But she insists it's necessary, putting forth a challenge; “Maybe we need to stop serving industry and just serve humanity.” That means thinking about mutual aid, alternative economies, ways of creating value that don't require dollar signs.
She also believes designers need to engage with policy, even though it's tedious work. Someone has to read the legalese, shape the regulations, constrain bad practices at scale. Designers understand how decisions ripple across systems - from global environmental impacts to the farmer needing water while data centers drain resources for AI-generated videos. That systems thinking, that ability to see how the small connects to the large, matters everywhere. Not just in studios, but in government, in regulation, in the structures that shape industries before products are even imagined.
As the conversation winds down, Raja returns to a simple truth: the creative practice of design isn't going anywhere. People will always need to solve problems, always need to iterate and refine. What's shifting is the context, the speed, the complexity. And maybe the field does need to let go of rigid titles and embrace something more fluid. But the core remains. Designers bring something irreplaceable: the ability to understand people, to make ideas tangible, to ask what the world needs rather than just what it wants.
It's a defiant optimism, grounded not in naivety but in experience. Raja has spent decades watching students discover design, watching them struggle and adapt, watching them go out into a world that doesn't always recognize their value. But she also knows that the world cannot function without them. The question isn't whether design will survive. It's whether designers will remember what they're actually for: not just making things, but making things better. Not just serving industry, but shaping the future in ways that honor the people - and the planet - that will inherit it.
Raja Schaar, IDSA is Associate Program Director and Assistant Professor of Product Design at Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. She also co-chairs IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council. She is an industrial designer with an extensive background in museum exhibit design who is passionate about ways design can make positive impact intersections with health, the environment, and education.
