The more things change, the more they stay the same. Photos by Kyle Oldfield, winner of our design school photo contest

Yesterday we published the last installment of our D-School Futures series, in which we interviewed the chairs of 11 leading industrial design programs about the evolution of ID education. Along the way, we gleaned quite a few insights into what it's like to be an ID student today, how schools are reacting to rapid changes in the industry, and what all of this means for incoming students and recent graduates. For those of you who haven't had time to read the full series—or who just love a good listicle—here's our shortlist of five essential takeaways.

1. Now Is a Really Good Time to Launch a Design Career OK, so you would expect the chairs of design programs to be bullish about the profession; they couldn't very well tell us that now is a crummy time to get a degree from one of their programs. Even so, our interviewees gave us the distinct impression that now actually is a really good time to be getting into industrial design, or any design field for that matter. With the economy looking increasingly healthy, design firms are hiring new graduates at a steady clip—and, more importantly, businesses of all stripes are continuing to recognize the importance of design to their bottom lines.

2. Designing Physical Stuff Is Not Becoming Less Important—If Anything, the Opposite Is True Worried that designers of actual, physical stuff are going to become obsolete in the coming decades, as more and more of our daily tasks are handled by digital tools? Don't be. As several of our interviewees noted, physical objects are not going away anytime soon—and, besides, as digital tools become more advanced, people will expect richer and more nuanced experiences in ye olde three-dimensional world. "While our tools and experiences are moving toward digital interactions, there will always be physical, visual or multi-sensorial manifestations that are part of the input and output of those interactions," Art Center's Karen Hofmann told us. "Design will be the differentiator in how successful or meaningful those product experiences will be."3. The Industrial Design Curriculum Is Expanding at a Terrifying Rate The good news is that design's reach is expanding; the bad news is that the skills designers need to be competitive are also expanding, to the point where it's really difficult for a single program to teach the core ID skills plus all of the other stuff that is now relevant to the profession, from coding and UX design to global business savvy. As Carnegie Mellon's Wayne Chung puts it, "ID education today is requiring us to shove ten pounds into a five-pound bag." This places an added burden on educators, but it also, of course, puts more responsibility on students' shoulders—which bring us to our next point . . .

4. Budding Designers Need to Be Adaptable, Improvisational, Entrepreneurial and Comfortable with Failure Sure, some ID graduates will go straight to a steady gig at a design firm and enjoy well-defined job roles thereafter. But that career track is becoming increasingly less common, and our interviewees stressed that designers-in-training need to prepare themselves for a pretty unpredictable ride. (The University of Cincinnati's Craig Vogel likens today's design careers to "improvisational jazz.") To be successful over the long haul, young designers must learn to sell their ideas to a non-design audience, work effectively on a variety of teams—and quite possibly launch their own entrepreneurial ventures. Oh, and they should get used to failure—both because it's inevitable and because, as SAIC's Lisa Norton suggested, getting students to "befriend failure" can encourage creative breakthroughs.

5. With Great Potential Comes Great Responsibility Overall, these 11 interviews make design seem like a pretty awesome profession with huge potential for growth—and that's true. But design also raises some uncomfortable issues that need to be seriously confronted by anyone entering the profession. Namely, we are living in a world in which making more stuff—even very nicely designed stuff—is quite plainly speeding us along the road to planetary ruin. Young designers in particular need to set their sights higher, and think about how the profession can move toward designing solutions to our most vexing problems. As SVA's Allan Chochinov puts it, "We believe that design has transformed the world, but that the world is now demanding the transformation of designers—from generators of consumptive demand to creators of real and shared value."

  The Complete Series:

Carnegie Mellon's Wayne Chung on Training Designers to Solve Wicked Problems

SCAD's Owen Foster on the Value of Being a Hybrid Designer and the Four Most Important Qualities in an ID Student

RISD's Soojung Ham on Why Now Is a Great Time to Embark on an ID Career

Pratt's Scott Lundberg on Teaching ID Students 'to Think and Act with Change'

Cranbrook's Scott Klinker on Why ID Education Should Move Students Beyond Skills Toward 'Cultural Maturity'

CCA's Sandrine Lebas on Why Designers of Physical Experiences Will Always Be In Demand

Georgia Tech's Jim Budd on Why There Has Never Been a Better Time to Pursue a Career in Industrial Design

Art Center's Karen Hofmann on the Ever-Expanding Role of the Designer and What It Means for ID Education

SVA's Allan Chochinov on the 'Difficult, Conflicted, Blurry Territories' Facing Design (and Design Education)

The University of Cincinnati's Craig Vogel on Why Today's Design Careers are Akin to Improvisational Jazz

SAIC's Lisa Norton on the 'Thinking-Making' Approach to Design Education, and Why Her Students Must Learn to Befriend Failure