Leadership Thinking for Design Discipline. Coaching how to Navigate between Potential DYNAMIC and Power ENERGY

“Revolution” is defined in two different ways: first as a word used to explain the movement of a celestial body around the orbit and the period made by the regular succession of a measure of time or by a succession of similar events; second as a sudden outbreak in the accepted social norm, a fundamental change in the way of thinking and a change of paradigm1. While the former explanation has extensively been used to mark innovative technological progress, in the next paper we propose a different way of looking as revolutions in design education, not as sudden outbreaks but as cyclical adjustments to the reality of the working environment for which design education prepares the students. While the design market place and working habits changed radically in the last 20 years, the perception of the role of the designer in design schools didn’t adjust accordingly. The paper is therefore reflecting on the following question: given the uncertainty of the future and the, what is the role that designers are most likely to step-in? Starting from the assumption that the working space doesn’t have physical boundaries anymore and designers have to re-invent themselves with each job, we speculate on the raising importance of teaching a leadership attitude in conjunction with practicing design skills from the first years of design training. To support this argument we will stress out how leadership implies projecting the potentiality of taking responsibilities, and preserve the creative energy, in contrast with the deployment of effort and skills intrinsic to the traditional design process.