During the recent economic downturn, designers fresh out of school, as well as experienced designers with­out jobs, have had to look for avenues outside of design to support themselves. The overall economy is improv­ing, but it has not generated jobs. Even jobs for hosts and servers in restaurants are difficult to find. During the depression, many American college grads also could not find jobs in their special­ties (women or other minorities were in even more trouble), so they became primary and secondary school teachers, enrich­ing the lives of children in the following decades.

Today, 40 to 50 percent of design school grads are not work­ing in fields obviously connected to their majors, but this has always been true in design—as well as in science and law. After speaking to many new grads and reading their blog posts, I realized that most have no idea of the range of possibilities under the “design job” umbrella. The only people who can solve the problem of generating earning opportunities for unemployed designers are designers. So I decided to investi­gate what else people with design educations can do, if they can’t find design jobs.

Networks have always been important to finding work and they thrive on disseminating information in a crisis. Companies have cut back spending on paid job posting sites and referrals from employees’ networks are an important shortcut to quali­fied talent when so many apply for each job. Persistence with a plan is the key when there are no jobs with your name on them. Face reality and be responsible. Figure out what you do best; what your skills are. Some people find alternatives by design, others by accident. Jean Mitsunaga, director of career services for Art Center College of Design sets the stage: “The world looks for skills, not majors.” Dan Sellers, a UX/brand creative director advises, “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice…have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” (I add: Give yourself a reality check.)

Some designers want to make a difference and don’t wait to be unemployed to figure out how. Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, says he was the black sheep at architecture school. While others were designing “jewels for people to crave,” he wanted to do humanitarian work and tackle systemic issues like the global housing crisis, the result of natural disasters, HIV AIDS, displacement by war, etc., with long-term sustainable construction and recon­struc­tion solutions. At age 24, he and partner Kate Stohr, started Architecture for Humanity with a Web site and $700. Armed with cell phone and laptop, he met people for coffee often five to seven times a day and openly asked them for $20 donations. In 1999, the first project was designing transitional shelter in Kosovo for returning refugees, providing the tools and space for them to advance their lives. The online call for designs resulted in hundreds of entries, and a number of proto­types were built. Two years later they were in sub-Saharan Africa developing mobile health clinics to enable doctors to reach and treat poor rural HIV and AIDS patients. Today with a staff of 3, the organization has 40 local chapters meet­ing local needs all over the world, and thousands of volunteer architects, designers and building specialists in 104 countries. When accepting the TED prize in 2006, Sinclair said he hadn’t slept in seven years. Read the book, Design like You Give a Damn, and check out volunteer opportunities on www.architectureforhumanity.org.

Making a difference also motivated industrial designer Thomas Peter Alan Robson to volunteer after graduating in 2003 for a small nonprofit (www.jufunze.org) doing educational work in rural Tanzania. Opportunities snowballed for design related tasks. They’d just opened a building for primary and secondary school with unfinished rooms and furniture. He helped design the region’s first playground and created a docu­mentary DVD. He loved listening to criticism of his ideas, and went about prototyping and changing. “It wasn’t about me, it was about them,” he said. Robson introduced barcodes on ID cards to provide data about playground usage, using technology to circumvent the local culture’s aversion to asking such ques­tions. With Excel on his laptop, he organized their financial system. Thomas did whatever was needed in the first eight months, learned the language, and returned to the U.S.

A staffing crisis brought him back (with salary) as director of pro­grams and intern and volunteer leader. By 2006, he was part-time executive director traveling to Tanzania every six months. He provided the local director and donors with a cohesive story of where the organization was going using diagrams, flow charts and other skills. After building local capacity, Robson was eventually able to phase out of manage­ment. Now he is doing mostly 2-D freelance “beneficial design” for people with disabilities in California, but Tanzania will always be a part of his life.