The Handbook of Design Management

Rachel Cooper, Sabine Junginger, Thomas Lockwood, Rachel Cooper, Sabine Junginger, Thomas Lockwood

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847884909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Conception
• Subtopic: Conception des produits

The management of design has emerged as central to the operational and strategic options of any successful organization. The Handbook of Design Management presents a state of the art overview of the subject - its methodologies, current debates, history and future.The Handbook covers the breadth of principles, methods and practices that shape design management across the different design disciplines. These theories and practices reach from the operational to the strategic, from the product to the organization.Bringing together leading international scholars, the Handbook provides a guide to the latest research in the field. It also documents the shifts that have been taking place both in management and in design which have highlighted the value of design thinking and design education to organizations.Presenting the first systematic overview of the subject - and offering a wide range of examples, insights and analysis - the Handbook is an invaluable resource for researchers and students in design and management as well as for design practitioners and professional managers.

PART I

Traditions and Origins of Design Management

Editorial Introduction

SABINE JUNGINGER AND RACHEL COOPER

In a departure from a traditional handbook, the first part of this handbook contains seven previously published works by authors who have made significant contributions to design management as a field and as a practice. Our decision to begin with the past in a book that is intended to be about the present and the future is based on a number of observations that we have made in our teaching, in our research and in our work with practitioners who concern themselves with design management. One notable finding is that fewer and fewer people are familiar with these early works. The reasons for this may be that much design management writing published in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is difficult to access today. It tends to be out of print and only selected libraries hold one of the remaining copies. These, in turn, are seldom called for since their existence is no longer widely known. This explains why we recently received a first edition of James Pilditch’s Talk about Design, published in 1976, which was as pristine as it was when it came off the printing press – the pages still stuck together. The possibility exists that this problem is greater outside the US and the UK, because many of the early prolific writers were associated with these two countries.

We see a need to bring these important texts back into the consciousness of current scholars, practitioners and students. We believe that one can hardly grasp the changes and shifts that have occurred both in design and in management without revisiting some of the original thinking. Can we grow the field of design management without looking back? What changes in design and in management have occurred since then? Which questions still have relevance? As we are scanning the current landscape of research, practice and education, we find that many of the issues and themes of the contemporary design management discourse are variations on themes and concepts that were introduced decades ago by these early scholars. What does this mean? Are we asking the same questions over and over? Have we made any progress? How? Where? These are just some of the questions that come to mind and for which it is worthwhile to find answers. Reprinting these works is also a way for us to pay homage and to express our gratitude to the achievements of some of the design management pioneers.

There is, of course, the uncanny sense of bias in our selections, as they seem to convey that research into design management only took place in the UK, to some extent in the US and otherwise nowhere else. This is hardly the case. Nonetheless, we are just now beginning to embark on a journey of discovery that we hope will reward us with an even richer picture of the concepts, practices, methods and principles of design management than the one we can paint at this point in time. In making selections, one always has to omit someone or something. There are many outstanding works that we could and would have liked to add to this particular section. But, alas, the goal was to produce a handbook, not a classic reader in design management or its history.¹ If anything, our limited selection demonstrates the need for such a book. With the pieces presented here, we hope to provide students, researchers and practitioners interested in the bigger picture of design management some pointers as to where they can look for further materials.

We begin with a piece by Bruce Archer, published by Design Magazine in 1967. In ‘A Place for Design in Management Education?’, Archer argues for management programmes to include education about matters of design. For those readers interested in the developments of design education in business and management schools, this first chapter offers a historic background to Part II (next part of this handbook). We continue with Michael Farr’s answer to the question ‘Design Management – Why is it needed now?’ In this essay from 1965, Farr offers an early definition of design management and a description of the tasks of the design manager. Farr positions design as a ‘competitive advantage’. As will become obvious in Part III, design and the activities of designing today continue to circle around aspects of competitive advantage. This piece, too, was originally published in the Design Magazine (1965). Farr was the first to call for design management as a specialization of design. In this piece, he provides a first definition of what the position of a design manager encompasses.

Our third classic reading is currently enjoying renewed popularity both among students of management and of design. The discussion of ‘Silent Design’ by Peter Gorb and Angela Dumas marks a significant shift for design and management, as it begins to look into the question of who is actually engaging in design activities. This question has gained new relevance with the foray of design in public organizations, public services and even in governments. Today, many people remain unaware that they are (a) dealing with a design problem and (b) actually making things, shaping all sorts of human interactions which influence their own environments. Several essays in Part IV touch on different aspects of the ubiquity of the practice of design.

We are delighted to include ‘The Designer Manager Syndrome’ by Sir Misha Black, a chapter from one of the first books on design management that originated in the US and which is based on the six Tiffany-Wharton lectures on the Art of Corporate Design Management hosted by the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. Walter Hovington edited the book for Tiffany & Company in New York in 1975. In this chapter, Black refers back to Moholy-Nagy (1947) to suggest ‘design is an attitude of mind’. He then observes that, for design to have a greater role in business, a design attitude ‘must permeate management’. The development of design attitude in organizations poses one of the key contemporary challenges, both for managers and designers.

Mark Oakley counts among the most prolific and relentless writers on design management. His interests in the problems surrounding managing and designing ranged from educating managers (Oakley 1986) to the influence of design in industrial and economic achievement (Oakley 1985). We have decided to reprint his insightful analysis of ‘Organizing Design Activities’, an excerpt from his book ‘Managing Product Design’, published in 1984. This chapter is mandatory reading for anyone trying to come to terms with some of the core challenges designers face while working with or within organizations. This includes the location of design within a particular organizational structure, which has great influence on the authority and power of design. It also includes organizational and managerial resistance to change. Oakley does not limit the organization of design activities to these two aspects. Nonetheless, power and resistance to change remain two important challenges for today’s designers, who engage with ever more complex problems in ever more complex organizations.

In the context of marketing and strategy, the work by Philip G. Kotler stands out. We decided to include the paper on ‘Strategic Design – A Powerful but Neglected Tool’, which he co-authored with Alexander Rath and which was first published in the Journal of Business Strategy in 1984.² For anyone wondering about the origin of the term ‘design thinking’, it might be worthwhile noting that Kotler and Rath used ‘design thinking [that] goes into product development work’ as a criterion to measure a ‘corporation’s design sensitivity and design management effectiveness’. In regards to design and marketing, ‘Humanistic Marketing’ (Kotler 1987) offers another fundamental reading. Unfortunately, we could not include it in this edition.

James Pilditch, one of the grandfathers of design management, will have the final word in this section. We have included the opening chapter from his classic work Talk About Design, which was first published in the UK in 1976. ‘Into a Changing World’ provides insights into the hopes for design management at the time. More importantly, though, we can gather that design here is bigger than a product or a company. Social problems come into the fore, the need for designers to conceive of products that are ‘good’ not for their own egos but for the people they design them for. In this sense, Pilditch already foreshadows one of the most significant shifts that have taken hold in design and management over the past years. No longer is it sufficient to worry about how to make something, although some design managers refuse to acknowledge this. Instead the question begins with why we should make this in the first place. Foremost of all, design is concerned with change. And this is a theme that is driving the current discourse on design management – be it in the form of innovation, transformation or organizational change. It is noteworthy that Pilditch was familiar with the work by Peter Drucker, another management scholar whose work is highly relevant in the context of designing and managing. Drucker, says Pilditch, considered marketing and innovation to be the ‘only worthwhile occupations of management.’ Pilditch offers this wry response: ‘Design, by the way, runs all through both’ (marketing and innovation) (Pilditch 1976: 10).

NOTES

1. A history of design management would also need to include the key developments and paradigm shifts within the field of management. Mauro Guillén’s Models Of Management, for example, offer a helpful background of the developments in management thought and practice that link directly to the role designers and design can have in an organization (Guillén 1994. Models of Management. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

2. The publication date on the Journal of Business Strategies website cites the year 1993 as the year of publication, whereas Kotler himself cites the same edition of the journal (vol. 5, issue 2, pages 16–21) but from 1984.

REFERENCES

Kotler, P. (1987) ‘Humanistic Marketing: Beyond the Marketing Concept’, in A. Fuat Firat, N. Dholakia and R. Bagozzi, Philosophical and Radical Thought in Marketing. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, pp. 271–88.

Moholy-Nagy, L. (1947) Vision in Motion. Chicago: Paul Theobald & Co.

Oakley, M. (1985) ‘The Influence of Design on Industrial and Economic Achievement’, Management Learning 23(4): 3–13.

Oakley, M. (1986) ‘Bringing Design into the Management Curriculum’, Management Education and Development 17(4): 352–62.

Pilditch, J. (1976) Talk about Design. London: Barrie & Jenkins.

RECOMMENDED READING

Guillén, M. (1994) Models of Management. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

1

A Place for Design in Management Education?*

L. BRUCE ARCHER

There is now a steady flow of trained designers into industry. But are these designers being skilfully managed so that they can produce the most effective results? An examination of management courses shows that little time is given in most of them to the management of creative design work and of innovation generally. In 1965, the Council of Industrial Design raised the problem of design management in a joint meeting at the Financial Times between management consultants and industrial designers. Since then, the CoID has joined some of the marketing conferences of leading consultants, and has taken part in a few management courses.

In the following article, L. Bruce Archer argues the case for including design as a subject in management courses and comments on the reactions to this view of some principals and course directors at selected business management schools. In a subsequent article, J. Noel White, deputy director, CoID, who is a council member of the National Marketing Council, will discuss the practical aspects of design management which concern industrial organisations. These aspects include the relationship of a company’s innovation policy to its product development programme; the organisation of an efficient and speedy flow of information from market and technical research into the design department in a usable form; and the appropriate location of the design department in a company’s management structure. If business schools are to include design management in their curricula these questions must first be answ...