A One-Day conference about Designmanagement would not be that remakable - unless it takes places in Germany. So many thanks to Univ.-Prof. Dr. Brigitte Wolf (Bergische Universität Wuppertal) and her great team to establish these conferences - this year the 4th one:
The topic was Are there boundaries for design?
With speakers like David Griffiths, who showed us the future designworld of India, Pal Smith-Meyer from LEGO who talked about his experiences of customer-participation in productdevelopment, and Thomas Zeitner who gave deep insights into the rapidly changing gaming market - I came to the conclusion that design has no boundaries!
I´m really looking forward next years session!
http://www.design-management-forum.de/index.html
Next Design Management Forum will take place at one of the first Weekends in November 2008.
Management Killer
Thanks Jules for kicking off our reception. Jules is one of the research students who have agreed to open and lead discussions.
And Jules: a practical and a more theoretical question:
1 Is this Design Management Forum linked with the Design Managment Institute?
2 Perhaps 'design' has no boundaries, but Design Management(as a field) must have one?
Best,Rosan
Design management definition?
Hello Jule,
this is a very general question, but: Can you give a short description of what design management is all about? Is it managers managing designers, or managing design? or designers managing themselves?
In any case, it reminds me of something Kees Dorst told in his keynote at the IASDR conference. He observed changes in the way design agencies work due to globalization. As the costy parts of the design work are often shifted to countries with lower personnel expenses, designers in the Netherlands have turned more or less into consultants and concept designers. It is obviously much harder to make a living like that. This is why some of them (the ones that did not close) changed their working procedures, developing their own projects and then looking for appropriate partners for the realization instead of aquiring companies first. (This is not so much about boundaries, more about borders.)
Katharina.
across borders ,)
Of course each discipline has boundaries..
But as you wrote Design Management Agencies are not very common in Europe yet.
In the BBE Study „Design 2010“ Frank A. Reinhardt and Claudia Wanninger also write about that phenomenon, that the term „Designmanagement“ often is used as buzzword in diverse portfolios of the creatives. For real they sell „hand-on“ design (like graphic-, industrial-, textile-,...) and use this term to underline their economic and strategic competencies. But the management-aspect is more or less about managing the own service.
Furtheron the authors devide the „real“ Designmanagers in two parties:
One are the buyers and sellers of creative offers, who arbitrate between company and designer..
The other ones are a kind of Design Consultants, who advice their clients under strategic aspects in every sequence of the design process.
And a finnish Design Study validates what Kees Dorst said and the german study too: design agencies have to change their working procedures.. Mostly designers get a brief and then primary visualize their ideas. It ends up with a presentation for the client and hardly one Designer attends his idea through the business processes. But as we can read finnish enterprises exactly at this point want more Service around Design: page 33 of the great finnish Study „From Design Services to Strategic Consulting“
Learn more about designmanagement in general under http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designmanagement
Study „Design 2010“ (Status quo and further development of the competitive factor Design in GERMANY until 2010, only german, order at BBE Unternehmensberatung, Gothaer Allee 2, 50969 Köln, Tel 02 21 - 93 65 52 09)
Study "From Design Services to Strategic Consulting - improving Core Competencies of Finnish Design Consultancies"
(you have to google this - it was a fluke)
crossing borders
Well, reading through DMI journals for a while may lead to impression that DM is in particular about branding issues. That may be fine so far (or rather boring) - but brings in another point (shaping commercially marketable presence) into all those that organising-in-design may include that by no means (in my opinion) would deserve the particular attention to 'turn all design procedures to' as some claim. In other words: design management must read to both 'managing design' AND 'designing management' - and that is what business administrators and the likes tend to deny usually... Moreover, I think of course that entrepreneurial behaviour is already a certain way of designlerly utterance (see 'entrepreneurial functions' as per Schumpeter); even accountants' beings in their fixation to quantitative expressions (of what sinistre origins so ever) rely on certain feelings within their very guts (i.e. they are subject to as well as reproducing, a certain reality in terms of their professional repositories). But whether professional designers should bow to the cultural poverties implied here more often than not - I would opt for resistence here...
killer definitions
Another just popping up to my mind is that if (as empirical evidence cited above seems to suggest) designers shift from mere 'produktgestaltung' (styling) in instrumentally narrow sense to consultancy in wider sense - does that not show that designerly ways of operating surpass by far simple adherence to traditionally taught professional rules of (decorative) crafts? Because obviously, those designers-turned-consultants must have something valuable to offer...