The reality increasing complexity and the impact of the rapid change puts pressure on skills development capable of facing the challenges placed by major global problems. 21st century societies are increasingly dominated by intense information and knowledge processes. Intangibles intensify their dominance over demand, often exceeding the importance and value of physical goods. This reality coexists with an increasing demand and consume of sustainable products. The pressure made by this environment is defined by gradual market behavior reconfiguration, making communication processes more complex, subject, and volatile. Responding to all stakeholders at different levels must align with solutions requirements capable of climate change and environmental degradation global challenges approaches. This critical problems about our common future introduces a new look at ethical issues.

The challenges about the future of education have to do with large scale, with processes requiring the ability to deal with complex conceptual frameworks with context dimensions involving economic, ecological, social, cultural, and political issues of societies in permanent change. The accelerated transformation of reality questions the future role of the human in the technological context, placing the need of thinking about the importance of intrinsically human competences. Creativity, curiosity, empathy, sensory capacity, dimensions of an intuitive knowledge base, and an ecological consciousness are recognized as a fundamental part of a set of competencies of a “cognitive device” for complexity approach. Educational systems must face students’ needs when integrate multidisciplinary teams where the boundaries between artifacts, systems and processes are increasingly ambiguous.

Competencies transition is becoming an imperative for designers, requiring technological and management skills, and leadership capacity on complex processes. Preparing designers for their needs about collaboration and cooperation skills in HCD is in tension with a reality where the integral potential of design to deal with complexity remains unaware. the challenge for future design education is huge because design is a complex field of a practice and an academic discipline.

The design community recognizes the strategic value of designer’s multidisciplinary skills and recognize the ability to lead processes involving large socio-technical systems. However, today the designer’s role faces the challenge of multidisciplinary working teams where skills goes far beyond their traditional responsibilities. In the thinking and practice of design there’s a set of core values ​​and virtues of the designers that allows a strategic positioning of this professionals in the complex solving problem context. Design as a discipline deals with how knowledge and ideas are transformed into material artifacts. As a cognitive activity design is about solutions development with information processing with a methodological oriented approach supported by a particular way of thinking about problems, responding to new and future needs (Cross, 2007). Modern design knowledge must address problems in a collaboration mode, supported by an effective network of educators and professionals. New methods, new research practices, team diversity, with specializations and cultural aware, envision new dimensions for design that demand an accurate debate.

Before this recognized pressure for design expanded competences and new mindsets, we look for understand from major European design organizations, such as Design Council and BEDA, and the North American AIGA, the perspective of professionals facing these tensions. To understand the design community's vision for the future, based on the vision shared by this organizations, we also placed a particular focus on the needs identified for 21st century design education and the proposals for broader new skills development. Simultaneously, we carried out an analysis of relevant contributions on the ongoing reflection and debate within the design research community about design education. Based on a revision of design thinker’s recent literature we pursuit our investigation from a formulated hypothesis: there is an alignment between professional and academic design communities view about the future of design practice.

The research verified there’s reflection and debate within the design community with important contributions to the importance of a central core of principles for 21st century design education and practice. This set of principles must be transversal to all design disciplines and their specificities and should contemplate a response to systemic change, contexts, and global challenges, in addition to traditional questions closely related to designer’s performance about artifacts creation. From the contributions analyzed we verified that principles central core must be based on three pillars: ethics, justice, and environmental protection. The recognition of a profound transformations underway, determined above all by the gradual global cultural change, increased the perception that the designer’s product and communication development must be aligned with United Nations sustainable development global objectives. The proposal of a set of updated critical dimensions for design activity changes design processes to more chaotic and ambiguous, where finding unique connections that result in valid solutions implies synthesizing stimuli and information with large volumes of data in constant interaction. Designers will have an increasingly complicated role in creating products, services and experiences which mean a profession under pressure to evolve towards a more complex multidisciplinary activity and, as such, more demanding in general and specialized skills.

Technology is increasingly integrated into our lives, in spaces, communication, and products, and it is not only a strategic resource of innovation but also a fundamental resource for planet sustainability. The future of design involves learning about technology, for real and virtual life, for all senses solutions. Design will have to integrate new thinking, logic, and rationality which implies projects with visualization and communication techniques proposed by new technologies. Technology is already reconfiguring the environment and the educational programs in design with the exploration of new methodologies, with permanent real context simulation, with users, consumers, and companies. Design research points out to design curricular programs where technology, culture and ethics form a training central axis of future education. There’s an emerging agreement that design education must prepare students to work in multidisciplinary teams in new projects that respond to real needs in a world where creativity must serve the major global problems.