Problem-solving, freer thinking to manage new opportunities, where the focus shifts from knowing the answer to asking the right questions, learn human behaviour and ethics, in other words, soft skills, for prosperous working life. As such skills are and will be a hard currency on the labour market. As Artificial Intelligence and robots take care of the hard data-based facts and monotonous handiwork. In this spirit design studies and liberal arts education in general are some of the main roads to the extraordinary opportunities to prosper in the digital society. To use the serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s words from a Bloomberg interview 2017:
“I personally think there’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data. And so having someone who is more of a freer thinker.”
JM Olejarz, assistant editor at Harvard Business Review, writes:
“What matters now is not the skills you have but how you think. Can you ask the right questions? Do you know what problem you’re trying to solve in the first place?”
Liberal arts and design studies should in this perspective also include hard sciences in combination with the softer that traditionally has been the core of the field. Even now there are many great examples of building a carrier from studies in liberal arts, like Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, that studied medieval history and philosophy, and Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, that studied English.
In an article on the website Study International several European Liberal Arts educations are listed, and the author writes:
“For students looking to expand their horizons with a liberal arts education, there’s no study abroad destination better than Europe. Historic architecture, poetic languages, delectable cuisines — the list is as long and impressive as the continent’s history.”
Written by
LarsGoran Bostrom©
New book from B-InteraQtive Publishing
eBook with audio-technology from SOE PublishingLab
