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In his article “Design and Transformation: New Theories of Meaning”, Gunther Kress (1999) outlines a model of education that he characterizes as design-based education. As he contends, language is no longer the foundation for literacy. Exploring the multimedia landscape of contemporary culture and communication, he suggests that language is merely one of the many strands within an evolving multimodal environment. He writes,


"[My argument] is that the semiotic landscape is changing in fundamental ways, and that this change relates to other changes in social, cultural, economic and technological domains. While a semiotic theory which could not easily account for change was never adequate to the facts of semiosis, it may have been sustainable in periods where change was less intense than it is at the moment, and when the forces of control were stronger, and less open to challenge at every point. (pp. 154-55)"


Kress anchors his theory of education in the context of agency and transformation. As he observes, while current theories of literacy interpret cultures as closed systems, design education explores culture and literacy in terms of ongoing innovation. As Kress contends, “an adequate theory of semiosis will be founded on a recognition of the ‘interested action’ of socially located, culturally and historically formed individuals, as the remakers, the transformers, and the re-shapers of the representational resources available to them” (p. 155).

If competency in the use of resources within existing cultural systems is the goal of current theories of literacy, then transformation and the reshaping of cultural systems is the goal of design education. Pointing to the fact that contemporary cultural materials are themselves the products of countless prior innovations, Kress suggests that cultural systems are ultimately iterative and cumulative. Much as design advances innovation in commercial industry, Kress understands the future of education in terms of iterative creativity. Putting forward a critique of critique, he argues that while critique looks at the present through the means of past production, creative design “shapes the future through deliberate deployment of representational resources in the designer’s interest” (p. 160). For Kress, the goal of design education is to utilize past productions as basic resources for future productions (with critique as one of many tools in this process). 

From the perspective of design education, organic transformation is critical to the health of contemporary educational systems. At the same time, contemporary institutions of education are already undergoing major restructuring due to changes in global economic production. Under global economic restructuring institutionalized education has shifted away from producing citizens for the state and towards producing workers for the global market (Readings 1996). As Kress observes, “the sites of education are now in question, as are their aims”.