The founder, Tiago Pedras, had been teaching web and digital design in an academic environment. He often described the idea of starting a school as being “born out of frustration”. What initially started as a concept, quickly received much praise from industry professionals and later materialised as an in-person program to be launched in 2017.
The v1 program ran for two years in 2017 and 2018, lasted 10-12 months, was highly modular, and adapted to the student’s profile. It helped students change from fields as diverse as Finances, Architecture or Chemical Engineering, and enter new ones such as UX/UI Design, UX Writing and Frontend Development. Sara Ramos was the lead facilitator of the project at that time and coordinated the program for the two cohorts.
TNDS3-5 (2020-2023) remote cohorts
In 2019, the project took a sabbatical break to reinvent itself and later that year launched a remote online version that launched just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
The v2 program was shorter (6 months) and focused more holistically in Product Design. There were fewer outside guests but the same focus in startup collaboration when it came to working on projects. Classes size was even more limited to guarantee learning quality. Tiago Pedras lead 3 online cohorts between 2020 and 2023.
Throughout 2022 and 2023, the school was invited to collaborate on several initiatives that aimed to continue to disrupt the design field, this time with more focusing on the recruiting of designers. Still, it couldn’t keep the momentum during a time of financial crisis, when mass layoffs of designers changed the landscape and training/hiring no longer made sense.
2014 to 2016
The early years of concept creation
From a first idea in 2014 to a name, a brand, a manifesto and the first applications in 2016.
In the years before we launched, despite much knowledge available online and in books, almost no digital design training programs existed in most countries, apart from a few exceptions. Traditional academic training was still the main path to become a designer, regardless of how disconnected from the industry’s needs.
The industry, on the other hand, was still figuring out how it wanted to work and how to best fit design into the workflow of startups and corporations that made software and apps.
In the first years, I played around with this idea of setting up a school outside of the traditional institutions he had been teaching at, all while debating it with people who would end up supporting this thought, such as Chris Murphy or Simon Collison. I remember being in a pub in Belfast with Chris in late 2014 who challenged me to go beyond some of my initial ideas and provided much help and food for thought. You could say the large vision of TNDS was born in that pub.
The early ideas for this school included a studio-like setup where students could both work and learn at. One which would foster both creativity and networking, since the connection with the industry was always seen as key.
Our mission? To move away from what we believed was an outdated educational system for the world we were living in.
Some of the paradigms we wanted to break
Being student-centered
Every professional will tell you that “school won’t teach you everything” and that “you must keep learning”. And yet schools are still formatting students instead of preparing them for this dynamic future.
Step away from the noise in academia, which focuses on a cumbersome system of grades, diplomas and internal validation.
Also move away from the idea that teachers are the source of knowledge and truth. Academics are often our of touch with the industry and it’s every-changing practices
Mere focus on hard-skills won’t take people far. Knowledge is wide spread now. It’s the cross-skills and tiny stories and lessons that are hard to acquire.
“School won’t teach you everything” and only with real experience can you grow and understand how things connect.
After a few missed partnerships and false starts, 2016 was the year things became more tangible. Although it was hard to define a business plan, I decided on a name, registered the domain and eventually started a company.
With the help of friends and coworkers, we designed a brand, organised a series of promotional events and wrote a manifesto, which would be the document that summarised everything we wanted to fix and was our most read article to date. We even launched a kickstarter campaign to try and get funds and word-of-mouth around.
Around this time we also started better defining what we wanted to focus on and how we would deliver it. With little more than that, we opened applications late that Summer.
The response was huge!, considering we barely had any furniture, staff or a proper calendar. We got around 100 applications/messages of interest from all corners of the world.
From the beginning, we aspired to be more than just a local school. We believed that our standards were greatly valuable to an international audience. We knew we had to dream high and we aimed at getting some of the most influential voices in the industry involved. However, only 7 people made through the whole admission process and most of them were either Portuguese or from neighbour countries.
At a certain point, a few individuals got involved in our project long enough to become advisors, such as Daniel T. Santos. He invested his love for education and design from the very beginning and introduced me to Sara Ramos, who became our lead facilitator at TNDS 1 and 2.
We felt like we needed to give the whole setup a trial, so around October we invited our friend Chris for a workshop.
Later that year, we had a final list of accepted students, a set of confirmed guest lecturers, and thanks to a couple of trips to IKEA, a sparsely furnished learning room.
TNDS1 ran for 10 months with 7 students, in a fish market.
And so the great day arrived! Me and Sara were super excited about the whole thing, while a bit unsure that our new school and office was going to be inside a fish market. Part of a creative hub there, saying our first year was eclectic would be an understatement. But some great things came out of that, especially the long glass walls, the short distance to the sea, and the many great folks we met along the way.
The co-working space in Matosinhos fish market that housed TNDS1, 2017
The first few days at school were hectic. We had a wonderful couple of “welcome days” with great energisers and team-building activities. But after that we were counting on the high morale and energy of our students to keep the learning going, which would prove insufficient.
TNDS1 students doing the marshmallow challenge during the welcome days, 2017
From the start, the mood was laid back and relaxed, so people quickly started feeling comfortable there. Either students or friends who would drop by once in a while, curious about TNDS and it’s concept.
TNDS1 students, 2017
From the start, we established that masterclasses would be an important part of our learning experience, through which we would bring in new experience-based knowledge into the classroom. We also had defined what our first topics and first guests would be.
Some of our first guests were Chris Murphy, Jeremy Keith, Vitaly Friedman and Trine Falbe, who covered a broad array of topics from the basics of design, all the way to user research. They also were great contributors with feedback regarding the school and in identifying student needs.
The fact that we were close to the sea and had great weather was also very attractive at times, with some of our masterclass guests making the most out of it. This allowed for the first 2-3 months to go by with very high morale.
In parallel with masterclasses, we wanted students to work on projects ASAP so they could start putting in practice what they were learning. This would allow them to keep learning while starting to build an early portfolio at the same time.
Some of these early projects lived on and turned into real start ups, like Beemine Lab from our student Telmo Güell (Spain).
While others were done in collaboration with NGOs or high social-impact projects such as Jon Barnes’ Democracy Squared.
Democracy Squared user test, TNDS1, 2017
All of these projects allowed the students to continue to explore the lessons from our guest speakers, while getting validation and feedback from industry leaders, which they did in several events throughout the year.
TNDS1 project presentation to guests Luis Vaz, Tiago Craveiro and Felipe Ávila da Costa, 2017
Throughout that year, TNDS became a hub for people to get together around the various topics of design and technology, which resulted in several workshops we either put together or hosted in our space.
Daniel T. Santos, Marta Fernandez and a fellow PortoUX co-organiser at a PortoUX event in the TNDS studio, 2017
Back then we hosted workshops around topics of design but also around remote work, blockchain, IoT and many other cool topics.
Blockchain workshop at the TNDS studio, 2017
Leisure time was something we wanted to explore from the start. The idea of a good life-work balance wasn’t something very present at the time but we were certain that it was important for high-performance learning. So we also made sure to explore our surroundings and make the most out of the beautiful “sunny Porto”.
TNDS1 surf lesson, Porto, 2017
Throughout the year we also managed to have a few mentors helping out the students in their path. It was important for us to make sure they had not just the right set of knowledge, but also certain aspects of their life set up for success. This was fundamental since not all students had it easy while changing countries and changing careers and had to deal with financial or family-related topics that could/did easily undermine their time at school.
Closer to the end of year, it was important for us to make sure our students felt as prepared to the job world as possible, so once again we turned to the industry to setup a couple of final projects with partners.
TNDS1 final project with HUUB (now part of Maersk), 2017
For the students, this was a trial-by-fire scenario, in which the brief and constraints were real, as well as the companies, who had real users and real business needs. More importantly, this was the starting point for some student’s portfolios which otherwise would not have so much value for potential recruiters had they only had fake exercises.
Even back in 2017, some of these projects involved the creation of Design Systems, complex interfaces for both desktop and mobile apps, as well as the need to understand business logic and other constraints.
TNDS2 ran for 12 months with 13 students, from a startup hub in Porto.
The “welcome days” from 2017 had turned out so good, we copied most of the plan and used most of the exercises again. In January 2018 they were even more exciting since we had a new space, more students, from more countries and much more diverse backgrounds. Overall the challenge was quite different and the stakes were high.
TNDS2 welcome days, January 2018
This time we changed offices and landed at a startup hub in the heart of Porto called “Founders Founders”, which was already famous for helping their member companies grow and evolve through knowledge sharing and many other types of support.
One of our first challenges this time was simply to bring all the foreign students to us. Applications were truly international and people came from far further than the EU, so problems with visas quickly became an issue we had to learn how to deal with. By the time we started, not all students had made it to Portugal yet or some had to go back to take care of visas from local embassies.
Part of the TNDS2 class (some students missing), 2018
The year quickly started with a couple of workshops and introduction to basic themes such as Design Thinking, since we had a big first project coming up which was a bit different from usual.
TNDS2 class with Edite Amorim, preparing for the project trip to Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo, 2018
By early February we went on a field trip into a small town close to the border of Spain. We had previously got in touch with the many efforts of a small group of scientists who wanted to change the social landscape of the town, especially focusing on young people.
TNDS2 field trip to Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo, February 2018
This was a sort of time-forgotten place where career opportunities weren’t abundant but mostly the motivation to go beyond those limitations was even shorter. So our goal was to find a way to drive some impact in showing and motivating high school students towards new careers.
TNDS2 workshop with local high school students in Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo, February 2018Read more about the project
The impact of the project was not as deep as we expected it to be. In the end, despite having come up with a blueprint for what we wanted to do, we had neglected key factors that would mean the project wouldn’t run on it’s own. The need to have a leader or guide to push things forward only became apparent later once we had left.
As soon as we came back, students were busy learning new things in either small workshops or longer masterclasses, some with our favourite guests from the previous year.
We also opened up a couple of days in each masterclass to the community, so more people could benefit from having these great speakers in town.
Open masterclass day, TNDS2, 2018
This time we wanted to expand our loose curriculum even further, while maintaining the concept of being student-centered. This lead us to fork the program in two possible directions for either design or code. Students learned about both topics in common masterclasses and closer to the end of the year they had topic-specific lessons.
By mid-year, we had started and finished around half a dozen projects. Some of these were done together with resident startups in our building and the results were amazing every time. During our final presentations, company stakeholders often said it was “spot-on” and had valuable insights or ideas they had thought of themselves.
After a short Summer break, a pic-nic, a surf lesson and a barbecue (we were in need of a good break), we went back to work.
TNDS2 summer picnic, 2018
Around July it was time to get back in touch with companies and startups. The fact that we were inserted in a startup-oriented building had kept students on top of how things work in this world but we wanted to go out and expand their horizons. We organised a “business week” during which we visited a series of different sized tech companies in Lisbon and Porto. From soon-to-be-unicorns to small startups. From agencies and software houses to product builders. Students were left with a broad overview of the kind of companies they could work in.
A few months earlier, we decided we needed to make a bigger push alongside companies in order to get more projects and preferably internships for the end of the year. We truly believed that companies would benefit from such projects both in the short and mid-term. I personally believed that if they saw just how great these new designers and developers were, they would be stupid to not want to hire one. The truth was a bit different to my disappointment.
At this point, the school was also starting to financially struggle quite a bit, since we didn’t want our business plan to solely rely on the money we got from student tuitions. Like I said, I believed there was value in it for the companies too, and I was sure there had to be some kind of partnership format they would be willing to pay to be in. This proved much harder than expected, not just because of the money involved but other factors we failed to identify.
By September, together with our 3 advisors, we agreed that the project as a whole wasn’t sustainable as it was. There was way too much financial pressure and after 2 rough years, we were physically, mentally, and emotionally drained.
We still had one final mission to accomplish and that was to get all students involved with companies in either internships or actual jobs. We had started going through our contacts a couple of months before and managed to secure the easy ones, in which the company had an identified need and the student was the perfect match. We realised we had overpromised when we announced every student would have an internship but felt like we needed to sort this out in order to make things right by everyone.
By the end of the year we had organised workshops, hosted events, and even recorded podcast episodes. We collaborated in design sprints and created job-seeking hackathons. We welcomed a wonderful series of masterclasses and worked on a series of projects with many different companies and stakeholders from multiple countries. We had went on field trips, some of which were long and demanding. We learned about Agile, UX, JavaScript, Design Thinking, and much more.
Mike Monteiro recording the TNDS podcast, 2018
For most of the students this was all great. It was bumpy at times and sometimes the next steps weren’t as clear as we hoped. Some students went back home, some managed to stay in Portugal. As for us, we were in great need of a long break and rest.
In late February 2019, almost all of the students had found a job in the field in some form or shape. All of them remain in the field of design or code development to this day.
A sabbatical year spent rethinking the model and planning a remote programme.
Announcing we were taking a sabbatical was a hard and sensitive topic to touch upon. We had thrived that far in part thanks to the hype we were able to build. It helped in meeting new people and opened quite a few doors when we wanted to meet new partners. So slowing things down like that was the first of a series of counter intuitive steps that were yet to come.
It was a much needed time for me, since the years in which we ran TNDS had come with much personal and professional turmoil. So in the first few months I tried not to give it much thought and yet the thoughts came anyway.
I started writing about our past experience around February, trying to write a manual on how to run a school similar to TNDS. I didn’t go far, but the point was similar to what I’m doing in this document right now: to share knowledge with others. I knew the smallest amount of impact created in the community around me, mattered.
Spring came and ideas started to tumble around my head again. How could we learn from our failures and improve upon the existing model? What made the whole thing fragile? What other options did we had? What was the competition doing? I started looking into these questions and I read and wrote a lot about it. I researched all new and innovative schools that had emerged in the past few years and tried to identify what made them relevant and interesting.
I also looked at another idea we had had in 2018, which was to have a format of tutoring lessons for people who wanted to change their career but couldn’t afford such a high time investment. Could this be interesting? Could we become attractive to even more people with this format? Could we do it online? At the time I had just started working remotely for an American company but I had had work video calls for years before that, so the whole medium wasn’t that uncomfortable for me.
I was mostly running this new project alone since the previous team and advisors had been dismantled and I almost felt ashamed to ask for help again. I still got some feedback and around Autumn I announced a new remote program I called Private Tutoring. I meant to run this one mostly on my own, in a much leaner and lighter format.
Three online cohorts, TNDS3 to TNDS5, of up to 5 students each over 6 months.
Gradually I settled in on the idea that TNDS wasn’t going to grow or even compete in a new landscape of bootcamps which promised the world to everyone who wanted to change careers. I felt most of those offers didn’t really care about the student’s success but rather had jumped the #UXDesign wagon. I couldn’t help but try and do things differently.
This was the time of individual impact.
This time around I didn’t felt like having the pressure of paying rent so the format was quickly settled. TNDS was going to pause the full-time program and launch a remote, part-time, 6-month online program. We would target people who wanted to change careers into UX/Product Design but wouldn’t be able to quit their jobs or invest one year of their time in doing so.
Impact-making was always a defining concept from the very start of TNDS and this time wasn’t going to be different. With my focus on individual impact, I decided to make cohorts super small and settled on 5 being the maximum people I would be able to pay full attention to. Later I would reflect on this being one of the best decisions I made.
During applications there was quite a bit of confusion, since people had begun to know us as an in-person program in Porto, so some believed they were applying for that. The final list of leads was smaller than usual and we ended up with 4 very good people who fit the profile.
We started online classes in early January 2020, just a few months before COVID-19 hit and forced all programs to change overnight into that format too. By the time people started getting locked at home, it was already going very well for us.
I had kept a few key components from previous TNDS programs that were fundamental for success, such as individual mentoring sessions, live projects with partner companies and as much knowledge sharing on how the real world worked. At the same time, I kept components students had enjoyed very much, such as casual Q&A sessions with guest speakers and casual celebration moments.
Guest View with Igor Pascoal, 2020
During the course, we would log in twice a week after work to participate in a series of loosely programmed classes. These classes included a mix of slides, improv conversations, and feedback.
Additionally, on Saturdays, I would have one-on-one mentoring sessions with each student. Looking back, these private sessions proved to be as valuable as the classes for some students.
During the 6 months, roughly 1/3 of the program had a focus on knowledge sharing, in which we focused on learning the essentials and practicing a bit. The other 2/3 of the program were spent mostly with partner projects and all the work it involved.
In the first 8 weeks, I was the main point of contact with the students, while going through the basics of UX and UI, but also understanding how the industry worked and what would be expected of them as future designers. Some of these classes were also held by Teresa Faria, who consistently introduced students of all 3 cohorts to the basics of Design Thinking and user-centered design.
Besides the prepared classes, students were asked to spend quite a bit of time on their own discovering how things worked and what they would need more support on. Whatever skill they felt like they lacked, we would talk about it on their mentoring sessions on Saturday mornings.
The remaining 16 weeks of the program were almost entirely dedicated to 2 projects. Once again I had the intent of having students working with real companies and real problems, while also giving young startups the chance to try applying user research and design for free. They were encouraged to work in team settings just like in previous editions, which meant they had to acquire basic project management and collaboration skills. Overall this would give them many great lessons, such as a sense of just how much work is it possible in a given context or what tools work best.
Our projects usually lasted around 7-8 weeks, including preparation and early desk research. We ran projects in fields such as virtual IDs, crowdfunding, streaming, food delivery and even NFTs. We worked both with companies and non-profits, so we could understand just how different the two worlds are.
We would ask our partners to give us a brief that would be impactful enough on their side as way to make things real. It could be either a new feature for their website/app/digital product, or an optimisation to an existing user journey. Although it was for free, we warned them we would require their time to keep up with the project, as well as their help to get in touch with real users or the audience this was intended for. That could also meant an investment in paying for incentives for user interviews/tests.
Things didn’t always go as smooth as we would like them to. Even without money involved, students were able to understand why projects fail or how they don’t always go according to planned. Whether it was decision makers not showing up to calls or user interviewees who stood us up, these were invaluable lessons that otherwise they wouldn’t experience in an ordinary bootcamp.
In the end, all companies we worked with were highly satisfied. Some even stated they had had more satisfying results than with previous engagements with design companies. We would usually deliver a research report with some key findings in the early weeks and a (sometimes tested) prototype of how we thought things could be improved. The focus wasn’t so much in the pretty UI but often in the key improvements to the interface, tailored to the goals of the company. Several times we landed on ideas that the partner’s team were having themselves but hadn’t been able to materialise them.
In return for the value students had created, partners were invited to leave a LinkedIn recommendation for each one the students. In the end none of the companies hired a student although some collaborations did happen.
Throughout these 3 editions, not all students got hired or changed careers to UX and design. Although there was a boom of projects and open positions, it was a time for more senior designers to be recruited and the number of internships and junior positions was very low. Companies wanted to move fast and were adverse to risk. This, together with the excess of design bootcamps, were a few of the reasons why I decided to shut down the program. Still, around 2/3 of these students did succeed and have happily progressed in their careers.
Building any kind of company or institution from scratch is always difficult. Especially if it’s one that’s going against the status quo. At times it was very difficult to stay focused, to stay positive, to believe this was worth doing. The hardships, the packed schedules, the lack of money… they all have a way to push you to your tipping point.
But looking back now, I can see that we definitely helped change a few careers and lives for the best. Many people did impressive career changes, from very distant fields and some with some very different lives. In the end, nothing held them back, especially not themselves. I like to believe that we helped a bit but obviously not everyone could have achieved that.
On another note, we didn’t settle in conveying knowledge that we knew was available elsewhere, we wanted to focus on what really mattered so we heavily curated the lessons we exposed students to.
Vanessa Santos, TNDS5 student, 2022 to 2023
And finally we devoted a very large amount of time to think about the process. We were very careful and deliberate in how we did things and that’s also something I’m very proud of. We read, learned and talked about education while analysing existing methodologies and setups and with that we brainstormed new frameworks of learning, always with the learner at the center of things.
At times I even considered getting formal training in the field of education… but who was I kidding? 😄 I’m happy with all of these informal lessons I’m sharing with you here. I hope you take some value from it too.
A more personal note from Tiago
As I wrote this, I realised I no longer believe UX bootcamps or similar programs to be viable or beneficial for our field. At least not right now and in their most common form.
It’s not just new designers or researchers that are needed, but rather better recruitment processes, more/better internship programs, and new ways to help individuals gain confidence when starting a new career.
In the past decade, there has been a significant increase in interest in design among founders and managers. This meant a greater demand for designers, some of whom have profiles that academia was not even aware of short time ago.
Today, training programs for career changers have become a huge business, mostly done at scale, with little care to how serious and impactful this is. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine how damaging it could be to train a person for months without properly giving them a sense of what the real world really is like.
Furthermore, some bootcamps make hollow promises of free tuition, high employability and high paying salaries to bait people in, which might have worked in a booming economy but not anymore.
We knew that our values were not aligned with the scalability that most startups seek. We persisted mostly because we wanted to make a positive impact on the lives of those who trusted us with their lives. People moved countries to be at our school!
Nevertheless, if you were to ask me to train another designer today, I would be filled with doubt and fear, knowing that another aspiring junior designer might struggle to find a good job post or to get past early job interviews.
As we navigate through an uncertain future filled with ambiguous promises of world-changing AI, I will shift my focus to those who have already taken the courageous step of changing their careers. I will do my best to provide motivation, mentorship, and connections to new opportunities, even if it means helping one designer at a time.
