Taking the decision after high school about what to do with your life is a tough task for most Saudi graduates. Many schools and families do not pay attention to the student's talents or focus on their development and improvement, and students consequently face the difficulty of choosing the right major that they can cultivate a future in. Design is a major based on creativity, imagination and innovation. As these three can never be taught, but only developed in gifted mentalities, the design-oriented thinking of a teenager – before joining an undergraduate design school – should be introduced by teachers to various design disciplines. By studying personally in a design school, then working in the academic field, I have found that students who excelled in their initial design courses were the ones who had either been taught some design techniques before or had read about them. Students must practice designing. Those who feel passionate about designing with their initial design assignments can then excel more in later stages and improve quickly. The challenge is experiencing genuine passion towards design and designing and then taking this to a higher level of explicit communication and ways of design thinking. It is the student's choice later to choose whether to resume with the practical work or change to other majors that suit him/her. Most freshmen students initially think that design is a very easy major since it involves mostly practical work and comparatively less studying of texts. However, feeling motivated to design is prerequisite of excelling in the field. Many students find it difficult to adapt to the long hours needed to work on assignments, especially practical ones where strong effort is required. My experience of teaching a course given to students in their first year of interior design, for three semesters, is that students usually find it hard to cope with the first assignments and mistakenly assume that they will get easier. However, like every course, design is also a gradual one, with each term focusing on more complicated ways of solving design problems. Design is about generating emotive concepts and ideas into the real world and this requires a committed designer's soul. Yes, it is interesting to study design. But it is more of an engagement for life than anything else. Design students must always keep themselves updated about new designs and designers, and what is happening around the world to cope with any given design project successfully and confidently. Generally speaking, many think that they can design. But there is a major difference between knowing how to design and designing successfully. Writer's note: The pictures included in this article are about excellent designs and designers. Students must be exposed to such sources from around the world to enhance their design-centric education. Douha Youssef Attiah is an Interior Designer and Design Instructor at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah.
