Crafting a Curriculum Around Its Intended Outcome

In 2019, I was recruited as a consultant to help formulate a new Visual Communication Design undergraduate program at an institution that was preparing to transform into a university. The institution was expanding its academic offerings, and Visual Communication Design was among the new programs being considered. The decision to open the program had already been made at the institutional level, so I wasn’t involved in determining why it should exist in the first place. From my perspective, however, the timing made strategic sense. Visual Communication Design, or widely known as DKV, had been in high demand in Indonesia for nearly a decade, while the institution itself was entering a period of broader academic expansion. The challenge was therefore not simply creating another DKV program, but figuring out what this new program should become.

Starting From the End

Bandung already had several established Visual Communication Design programs, including the one I had graduated from. Entering that environment as a newcomer meant that simply offering the same collection of courses would give the new program little reason to exist. I therefore started from the intended outcome and worked backward. Before deciding what students should study, I needed to understand what kind of graduates the program should produce and how that profile could distinguish it from the programs already established in the region.

I studied the graduate profiles of the existing programs, looking both at what they formally promised and how their graduates were perceived more broadly. Three general directions became apparent. Some programs were strongly associated with illustration and graphic design, others with management and entrepreneurship within the creative industry, while another was closely connected to user interface design and technology development. These profiles gave me a clearer picture of the landscape and, more importantly, showed where a new program could potentially establish its own position.

I then looked inward and considered what kind of identity the new program could realistically build within the larger institutional ecosystem at the time. Technology, creative industry development, and the institution’s broader values became important considerations in shaping its initial direction. The resulting concept positioned the program around Visual Communication Design, information and communication technology, and its institutional values, with the broader ambition of contributing to Indonesia’s creative industry. Its missions and objectives followed the same direction through education, research, and community engagement. The positioning therefore came before the curriculum, because I needed to know where we wanted the program to take its graduates before deciding what they needed to learn within it.

Designing the Curriculum

My primary responsibility was formulating the curriculum structure and the documents that represented it. I worked closely with an assistant who helped gather references and handle administrative work, while the broader university transformation team held regular strategic meetings to make sure the new programs worked together rather than developing independently. This was important because none of the new programs existed in isolation. Their positioning, resources, and academic structures were part of a larger institutional transformation.

The curriculum eventually contained 50 courses and a thesis, but those numbers were the result of the design process rather than targets I was trying to reach. My approach was influenced by a problem I had experienced as a design student. I didn’t necessarily feel that my education had been missing particular subjects. The bigger problem was how those subjects were experienced separately. From my understanding, Visual Communication Design is an applied discipline, and designers are eventually expected to solve problems for people outside the design or even creative field. Doing that often requires combining knowledge from several areas rather than applying one discipline at a time.

Instead of simply removing courses from existing curricula, I looked for ways to give students more opportunities to explore those connections throughout their education. A student could encounter different approaches and subjects together, gaining experience in combining them while still learning. This seemed more useful than expecting students to learn everything independently and discover the relationships between subjects later. Students have different interests, use cases, and ways of approaching problems, so the curriculum needed to provide enough opportunities for those connections to emerge.

To structure this, I used techniques including card sorting and taxonomy analysis as part of the research and curriculum formulation process. I spent weeks, and eventually months, working through the structure because the curriculum also had to accommodate institutional requirements. The institution required every program to include certain thematic courses, even when they weren’t directly related to Visual Communication Design. Considering how dense a DKV curriculum already is, incorporating these mandatory components without disrupting its intended progression became one of the more difficult parts of the work.

A Different Kind of Design Problem

Designing a curriculum felt fundamentally different from designing a conventional visual artifact. With an interface or visual communication piece, I can iterate, test, fail, and revise. A curriculum doesn’t provide the same room for failure. Once students enter the program, the consequences of a poor decision can persist throughout their education, so every decision had to be considered much more carefully.

The timing made the experience even more demanding because I was simultaneously completing my Master of Management degree and working on my own thesis. Managing both responsibilities required careful control of my time and resources, but the experience also connected directly with what I was learning in graduate school. One of my lecturers once said that every master’s program is ultimately about the management of wisdom. The courses may cover strategy, human resources, operations, marketing, finance, and many other areas, but their deeper value comes from learning how those bodies of knowledge relate to one another and how they form a larger system.

I began to recognize the same principle in design. A curriculum isn’t simply a collection of courses, just as a website isn’t simply a collection of pages. Each component affects the others, and the value of the whole depends on how those components work together toward a particular outcome. The curriculum eventually received approval and the program was launched. Although I am no longer involved with the institution and cannot speak for how the program has evolved since then, the experience itself permanently changed how I understood design.

I entered the project, thinking about how to design an academic program, but left with a broader understanding of what could actually be designed. The subject was no longer a visual artifact with a defined interface. It was a system involving people, knowledge, institutional constraints, and long-term objectives. That experience strengthened my belief that being a designer at core means understanding the problem deeply enough to determine what needs to be designed in the first place, regardless of whether the eventual solution is a tiny artifact or an entire system.