Vocation-focused design education should ideally aim at foreseeing the challenges and opportunities society and industry face, and act accordingly to these needs. Some of the obvious questions are: what should the next generation of designers be able to do, and how should they do it? Or to phrase it from an academic point of view what should they learn, and how should we teach it? In order to answer these questions, we first need to fully understand what makes present education and teaching successful and how it is structured and pedagogically organised, before a next step can be taken. This paper will show case studies from a small international masters education in industrial design that only enrol approximately 20 students annually. Despite its small size, it has ensured that the design institute it belongs to is presently positioned in the top of the ranking lists for the most awarded design schools in the world, from three different design competitions representing Europe, Asia, and North America.