The acceleration of digital transformation has made digital tools increasingly popular in design education. Design education faces the dual challenges of cultivating innovative thinking and addressing social inequality. Traditional education emphasizes esthetic skills; the digital age requires comprehensive technical and interdisciplinary skills. Inequality factors, such as social class, economy, and race, hinder students’ career development. This study explores how digital design education affects the cultivation of innovative thinking and explores the impact of social background on career development.
Structural equation model (SEM) analysis shows that digital design education significantly improves technical ability, cognitive ability, and interdisciplinary ability. Social network analysis (SNA) shows that the fair distribution of educational and network resources effectively narrows the career development gap between students from different social backgrounds. The results show that digital design education significantly enhances innovation potential through interdisciplinary collaboration and technological integration.
The study proposes strategic recommendations for promoting educational equity and equal career development opportunities. The results provide a theoretical basis for cultivating innovative ability and addressing social differences in design education, and provide a practical guidance for improving educational policies and operations.
Introduction
With the acceleration of global digital transformation, design education is undergoing profound changes. Its goal is no longer limited to the cultivation of traditional esthetic skills, but it emphasizes the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge and the ability to solve complex social problems.
Digital technologies represented by virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence are reshaping the way of design practice and changing the traditional model of teaching and learning, from one-way knowledge transfer to an interactive and co-creative learning ecology. However, current research mainly focuses on the technical effectiveness of digital tools, ignoring the importance of the coordinated development of technical capabilities and humanistic literacy, resulting in an imbalance between “technical empowerment” and “value guidance” in educational practice.
At the same time, social structural inequality issues (such as class differences, racial differences, and uneven distribution of educational resources) significantly affect students’ opportunities to receive equal education, further widening their gap in innovation ability cultivation and career path selection.
