Design Management as core competency

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Knowledge Attitude Values Applied skills Understanding skills Design process Risk-taking Managing uncertainty Practical design skills Prototyping Drawing ability Observation Material Originality Creative techniques Researching Lateral thinking Market Anticipating future Commercial skills Logical thinking trends Forward thinking Technology Proactive in Communication skills Analyzing developing (Presentation and Prioritizing relationships report writing) Structuring problems User awareness Open-minded Computer skills Scenario building Narrative Culture Understanding Design for Synthesizing multidisciplinary manufacture Holistic thinking context Aesthetic awareness Focusing on usability Project management Intuitive thinking & action Human factors Attention to detail Optimization Consumer and stakeholder needs Manufacturing process Learning from errors Team work Human empathy Figure 2: Design skills: in italics, the strategic skills for now And one of most important skill is “holistic thinking” or the designers curiosity, their open-mindedness that transcends existing barriers of industries silos . The design agency IDEO has branded designers’ skills under the term “design thinking”, and their global success -- the Davos summit, Procter & Gamble, the design school that they have opened at Stanford University -- is evidence of the coherence between their discourse with the needs of both CEOs and politicians worldwide. Design science as entrepreneurial science on a society and world level. This, therefore, is where we must to return to our introductory remark on the contradictions in the design community, between the reality and the definition of the design profession. In the design community, and particularly among academics in design, everyone is familiar with: Simon’s design science, Donald Schon’s reflexive practitioner, and Willemien Visser’s vision of design as a construction of representations. Writers such as Bryan Lawson or Nigel Cross have explained designers’ ways of knowing and of thinking. Indeed every designer will probably refer individually to one or more of these concepts: design activity as problem solving, as part of the industrial process, as social engineering, as a question, as a research activity, as a discourse rather than a thing, as a label, 6
as an art form, etc. Why, therefore, is it that our current context requires us to return to the most basic of design definitions Design science is what is needed to change the strategic definition process within companies. Strategy definition is also becoming a complex and “wicked problem”; comparing and competing with one’s rivals on market share targets in well documented, static industrial sectors will provide no sustained advantage. This is not the way the economy is working now, after the digital revolution. Where is your “competition“ when industries’ frontiers are blurring, when Amazon and Google are the new entrants’ competition for traditional industries such as editing, publishing and general commerce Consequently, all strategic methods based on competition analysis, whether used by designers or by managers, are less and less relevant as decision-making tools. In this transitional economy, where any individual on the Internet is challenging the role of institutions to regulate the economy, new skills are needed to innovate in your relationship to the world. Design activity becomes an agent of change for prototyping the new socio-technical system that has to be invented, as well as for helping companies manage the transition between the old, and the emerging socio-technical systems. Recently, the way that designers think has become increasingly interesting to business managers because it is often seen as creative and holistic rather than specialist and bureaucratic. (See Figure 2: designers ’skills.)The emerging roles for designers in the 21st century, according to the previously discussed challenges in a complex world of stakeholders are: (Inns2007) -Design as a facilitator of thinking: the designer in the 21 st century will need to know how to mobilize and energize the thinking of others. -Design as a visualizer of the intangible: not a new role but an extended one, visualization of systems, relationships, emotions, experiences and networks. -Design as a navigator of complexity: in a world of complexity and ambiguity, designers have to understand complexity theory in order to help others understand complexity. - Designer as a mediator of stakeholders:“meta design” with tools that can allow multiple stakeholders to debate a complex issue. -Design as a coordinator of exploration: coordinate the exploration of relevant technical and contextual sources to maximize creativity in the early stages of a design. What are these new challenges, and why is design the best solution Understanding the link between design as a core competency and the new “person-centric “economy may be seen through two examples: the healthcare industry and the travel industry. 7
Page 1 and 2: Journal of Design + Management 2009
Page 3 and 4: design”;customers are not the onl
Page 5: See also the so-called Kim and Maub
Page 9 and 10: can’t see “ through the manager
Page 11: The problem, however, is that even

Design Management as core competency

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?