The Future of Design Education: Third Spaces for Experiential Learning

Note from the Editor:
The idea for this issue was born from my own relationship with cultivating third spaces, particularly through my Culture Push Fellowship in 2023. As a Fellow for Utopian Practice, I had the opportunity to develop my project Playdate, based in the belief that play is an essential act for imagination, connection, and collective exploration.

Within the gatherings that emerged through Playdate, participants came together with different skills, experiences, and curiosities, supporting one another through making. Not only a workshop or event series Playdate became a temporary commons where people could learn about themselves while being with themselves, and with others.

Experiences like these shaped my understanding of third spaces not only as places, but as practices. They are environments cultivated through shared intention—where imagination, conversation, and making can take place outside of the formal structures that often define how we learn, work, and gather. The projects and contributions in this issue reflect that spirit: an interest in creating conditions where new forms of thought, collaboration, and possibility can emerge.

THE SCENE

The American Higher Education system is failing for innumerable reasons—the precarious job market, the post-pandemic enrollment collapse, the mounting student debt crisis to name a few—but beneath those systemic failures lies something more fundamental: the realization that the institution has been selling a dream it can no longer deliver. Younger generations are beginning to see the cracks, and are falling through them. The return on investment is no longer romantic, guaranteed, or even logical.

The consequence is twofold: the system crumbles, yet the desire to learn remains unfulfilled. We now have a generation that is hungry to learn but struggling to do so within the confines of a structure that feels extractive, irrelevant, or indifferent to their lived realities. The ship may be sinking, but all is not lost.

DESIGNERS AS DREAMERS
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
Prospero’s final words, Shakespeare’s farewell. I’ve carried this line with me for years—through studying literature, linguistics, and my meandering art and design path–because it names a truth beneath all creative acts: imagination begets reality. The dream is not ancillary; it is the source.

Designers are the ones who materialize the dream—sometimes beautifully, sometimes disastrously. Every design begins as an idea, something that did not exist calls out be materialized. Designers themselves often begin the same way: with a dream.

For Quardean Lewis-Allen, Founder and Executive Director of Youth Design Center (YDC), that dream began with wanting to build his mother a home. From that seed grew the first youth-led creative agency and innovation hub in East Brooklyn—an intervention designed to bring STEAM access, creative resources, and entry into the innovation economy to young people too often held at the margins.

Quardean and I were connected earlier this year through a YDC alumni, who I worked with at a design agency a few years ago. Shortly after he and I met, I joined the YDC team as a Creative Technology Instructor.

When I sat down with him to talk about the future of design education, I realized he wasn’t speculating about it. He was already building it.

IVORY TOWERS

The path toward becoming a designer is, for many, labyrinthine: opaque processes, inherited biases, and an industry historically shaped by homogeneity echoing through the work. My own path was circuitous. Before I could even name design as a possibility, the idea was dismissed by immigrant parents who believed it was not a “real” career.

Quardean had support, but it came with caveats—be creative, but pursue something lucrative. Architecture. At eight, he decided he would go to Cornell. The first barrier for him came not as some grand systemic wall but a pedantic administrative technicality: a misformatted portfolio. That technicality led to a dream deferred. It was the kind of barrier mentorship could have prevented.

Herein lies the first issue: design has high barriers to entry, therefore fewer mentors and platforms for mentorship, which continues to uphold higher barriers.

When we talk about barriers, we often think of bureaucracy, policy, or the predictable logistical hurdles students encounter. While these are undoubtably significant, the underlying barriers are relational, structural, and emotional. They appear in the absence of someone to ask the right question to, someone to be there along the way. They accumulate until even the most motivated learners feel adrift, moving through a space where progress seems impossible. What is missing is not capacity but connection—the very thing institutions were meant to provide but which have eroded over time.

This absence is precisely why third spaces matter. They step in where traditional systems thin out, offering what has become rare: environments dense with support, guidance, and care.

Within these spaces, mentorship foregrounds the rest—community holds, design thinking opens, experiential learning engages, and youth-led practice empowers. Each of these factors becomes essential to the future of design education, creating a field where learners are not merely trained, but cultivated.

MENTORSHIP
At YDC, I sat down with an apprentice, Xion, to hear firsthand about his experience. One of the first things he identified as most valuable in a learning environment was being taught the right way the first time. For him, effective learning depends on the groundwork being laid early—cultivating a safe, open space where relationships come first. Without that foundation, instruction becomes limited, and learning becomes harder than it needs to be.

Xion is a young photographer who is currently enrolled in college part-time and participated in Youth Design Center’s Creative Apprenticeship Program this past fall. The program provides apprentices with a stipend for completing a six week program where they develop a technical design skillset (Graphic Design, Digital Media, or 3D Design). In Xion’s experience with traditional education, one of the most persistent issues has been a lack of individualized attention. Rather than being met where he was, he felt educators often attempted to prescribe a singular standard for how learning should happen, leaving him feeling misaligned and unseen.

He describes mentorship as learning that happens through proximity—by being in a shared, mutual space over time. This kind of learning occurs through a form of osmosis: observing how others think, work, and navigate challenges. It requires taking the time to understand someone as a whole person, including their personal, mental, and emotional worlds. These relational dimensions, he notes, are largely absent from traditional teacher–student paradigms.

Quardean found that mentorship in a Black professor who understood the exhaustion of navigating architecture’s racialized gatekeeping. Eventually he reached the same conclusion I had: a bigger institutional name might open the doors that were otherwise closed. For him, Harvard. For me, Parsons. But clout alone could not fix what was fundamentally broken.

COMMUNITY
We are living through devastating communal schism—atomized by technology, siloed by design.

After completing my undergraduate studies I decided to pursue UX design, believing it would be a way to bridge both of my interests in design research and graphic design. I soon became disillusioned with design–realizing how design often is a machine for profit claiming to design “for everyone,” which too often means for no one. This led to me furthering my studies to see how I could bring my values (care, humility, honesty) to design, feeling that they were missing from the industry.

Quardean witnessed similar deficiencies: the absence of vocational training, apprenticeships, accessible mentorship, and creative pathways in his community. Youth Design Center emerged as a response – community-based design for us, by us.

Xion is often at Youth Design Center doing photoshoots, borrowing camera equipment, editing photos, or just stopping by to check in. Without YDC, where alumni retain access to the space and receive discounted equipment rentals, he says he likely would have had to give up on photography after his camera broke. Instead, he has been able to continue practicing while saving for equipment of his own.

Being in the space also allows him to seek advice from more experienced creatives and photographers—guidance on how to invest in tools, navigate career decisions, and plan next steps. Xion and I have had conversations about whether financing a personal computer to edit with makes sense and what options are available to him. These conversations are casual, but they present critical, real-world knowledge—especially for an eighteen-year-old—that he would not otherwise have access to through formal education alone.

While YDC is setting a precedent for how design education can look, too much of design is still built for communities rather than with them.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
Design demands encounter. It requires iterative feedback between making and the world that receives what is made.

Yet design schools often seal students in hermetic bubbles—producing work seen only by professors and peers. It is often an echo chamber disguised as education. But design does not proliferate through abstraction. It requires friction, iteration, recalibration, action.

Youth Design Center reflects this reality. Apprentices design real things for real clients in the communities they inhabit. As Quardean frames it: “you can gain ten years of experience by twenty-four.”

One of the most significant lessons Xion has learned, both at YDC and as a young adult more broadly, is the importance of failure. Some lessons, he explains, can only be learned through falling and getting back up—through experimentation, missteps, and lived experience. Coincidentally, this is exactly what design teaches: how to fail productively, how to iterate, and how to turn mistakes into insights.

DESIGN THINKING
Not the flattened double diamond diagram but the mindset itself: speculative, iterative, outward-facing, and failing forward. A way of seeing problems not as obstacles but as opportunities. Design thinking is too often framed as a means to an end, as a straight-forward problem-solving blueprint. But the truth is problems don’t always have simple solutions. Being curious, persistent, and agile are essential tenets of design thinking that make it a useful, generative methodology, rather than a checklist. What’s more is that all people, but especially young people in this generation, need these skills not just for a career in design, but in life.

YOUTH-LED
The future of design education is not something handed down to young people; it is something built with them. Gen Z has an intuitive understanding of culture, technology, and media developed through everyday use and fluency. While institutions attempt to formalize these domains as areas of instruction, students often arrive with forms of tacit knowledge that challenge where expertise is assumed to reside. Institutions that continue to move at a snail’s pace will only continue to fall behind as they desperately try to catch up.

Xion notes that the gap between younger and older generations is only growing wider. Because of this, he believes it is more important than ever for educators to seek to understand younger generations—teaching with them rather than at them.

This perspective mirrors my own experience as an educator over the past several years. As a “zillenial,” technically at the upper edge of Gen Z, I share proximity with my students, but our lived realities and worldviews are still vastly different. Teaching this generation has required adaptation and unlearning—beginning with listening.

What comes next—whatever new shape design and design education evolves into— is at the will of the new dreamers.

THIRD SPACES
Design is problem-solving in practice, with and within community. Its teleology emerges not from theory but from praxis—from relational meaning-making that turns ideas into form and form into meaning. If design is to keep its promise, it must be practiced in places that cultivate encounter.

Which brings me to third spaces.

The need for third spaces—those environments neither home, nor work, nor school—has become increasingly visible since 2020, emerging as a response to isolation, disillusionment, and the growing recognition that learning must be lived rather than simulated. As many of the informal sites where people once gathered—community centers, clubs, local venues, and independent cultural spaces—have disappeared or become commercialized,third space infrastructures have eroded. In response, there has been a renewed urgency to rebuild such environments. Increasingly, individuals and communities are taking this work into their own hands: organizing pop-up gatherings, cooperative studios, reading groups, maker spaces, and informal workshops that operate outside traditional institutions.

These spaces offer what institutions can no longer hold:

Community — ideas grown in relation, not competition
Mentorship — reciprocal, personal, uncommodified
Experiential Learning — learning-as-doing, embodied and situated
Design Thinking — room to fail, iterate, imagine
For Us, by Us Praxis — built for the communities they serve, by the communities they serve

I recently saw this firsthand in the six-week graphic design course I taught at Youth Design Center. The students learned design skills—but what they found was a space they could not find anywhere else. A place to be held while they learned. A place where waking up meant purpose, where they could stumble and be helped back up, where isolation eased in the company of peers pursuing similar goals, and where the weight of uncertainty about the future was met with actionable steps toward something real.

Multiple students admitted that what they needed most was simply a place to figure out their lives. What they needed, in other words, was a third space.

This need surfaced in small but telling ways: heartfelt thank-yous, moments of vulnerability, and an eagerness to remain connected beyond the course itself. One of the clearest examples came on the final day of the program. After students said their goodbyes and left, four of them returned later that same day—without a reason, assignment, or obligation.

This is a space that invites return.

While Youth Design Center has particular relevance as a design-centered space, it is also exemplary of what educational third spaces can be more broadly. Design is not the only field that benefits from physical presence and relational learning. The sciences, the arts, and any community-based practice stand to gain from environments that prioritize connection, attention, and shared investment— from intentional third space cultivation.

THIRD SPACES AS THE FUTURE OF DESIGN EDUCATION
Higher education is faltering partly because it has lost its tether to lived reality. Third spaces fill the gap it has left open. They allow learning to be lived, communal, culturally situated. They invite youth not as passive recipients of knowledge, but as co-creators of it.

What the future of education requires:

places where learning is lived, not measured
places where community nurtures the learner
places where design is not taught—it is practiced, together

If we want a future where young people can dream, build, and contribute meaningfully to a world they are inheriting,
we must build the spaces that make that possible.

Why Design?
Designers are not simply makers; they are the ones who imagine what could be and turn those ideas into forms, systems, and experiences that live in the world. This is why I focus on design education: if education is going to change, it must begin with those whose work directly engages in making possibility into reality.

Designers need learning environments that combine guidance, support, and room to experiment—conditions traditional institutions fail to provide. Third spaces offer those conditions. They connect learners through mentorship, offer supportive communities, and ground learning in practice rather than abstraction.

In these spaces, design thinking is not taught as a framework but lived as a process. Students are given permission to take risks, to fail, and to learn through doing. Confidence is built not from mastery alone, but from repeated encounters with uncertainty and the knowledge that it can be navigated.

Designers are the dreamers who shape what is possible. Third spaces matter because they provide the conditions that allow those dreams to be pursued, tested, and realized. If institutions can no longer hold the dream, then we must build new places that can.

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WORKBOOK PDF

Youth Design Center also operates The Corner by YDC, a coworking, studio, and event space designed for creatives, entrepreneurs, and community members to work, collaborate, and host events. Proceeds from bookings and memberships directly support YDC’s mission to equip young people with design and technology skills that open pathways to future careers.

Taken by Xion Charles

This PUSH/PULL Issue was edited by:

Six Lambda

Six is a multi-medium designer, artist, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work centers on the call to imagine, dream, and realize the futures we want and need. Through projects like Playdate, they continue to invite audiences and peers alike to be both the dreamer, and the dream. Working across sound, sculpture, new media, and installation, their practice explores how sensory encounters can open new ways of perceiving hard to grasp topics including time, reality, and consciousness. Alongside their studio work, they develop participatory projects that cultivate communal imagination and third spaces for play, reflection, and collective exploration. Six holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design and their work has been exhibited and presented at Abrons Art Center, Microscope Gallery, IBM, and beyond.