Design management education: The UK experience

Design Management Journal, Summer 2002 by Hollins, Bill

In the United Kingdom; the first course in design management appeared almost three decades ago. Since then, there have been disappoitments, as well as successes. Bill Hollins examines the record to highlight promising initiatives, along with the problems-including a poor understanding of design among business professionals, a lack of teachers, and accreditation issues-that thwart academic momentum in this arena.

Design management has been on the back burner of many MBA courses since Peter Gorb introduced a design management module at London Business School in the 1970s. Despite the good reputation and popularity of the module, it failed to be widely taken up by other colleges in the UK. This was at least partly due to a shortage of instructors with actual experience in the practice of design management. In turn, the lack of courses in design management probably contributed to a further lack of teachers-a vicious circle.

Although the design management community is large, many of its members do not realize they are part of it (in effect, they perform a design function but do not think of themselves as designers). The academic design management community, however, is very small. There are fewer than 80 full-time academics active in design management education in the UK, and probably only half of those have actually been employed as design managers.

Furthermore, although we designers accept the importance of all types of design and, therefore, its management, most other management disciplines still choose to ignore us. To confirm, just pick up several of the recommended books from an MBA course and thumb through their indexes. Except in marketing books, the word design hardly ever appears, and the term design management is even rarer. As an example, although the recommended texts for the standard MBA at the University of Westminster include one specifically on design management, the only other place design is mentioned is in a text on operations management. There is a marketing text that discusses new product development, and hence design is implied, but there is no mention of design in the indexes of the strategy, economics, law, human resource management, or finance texts.

Introducing design management to the uninitiated

It is easy to show that a company that develops no new products will eventually decline and fail. It is only marginally harder to show that if a company develops new products that are failures, that company is likely to go out of business more quickly than if it developed no new products at all. It's not hard to see design as an important factor. However, design management techniques can be applied in situations far beyond the development of new products. They can actually make a business more effective.

The difficulty comes when lecturers want to show how design management can be applied to achieve business effectiveness. The key here is process. Design management can be defined as the organization of the process for developing new products and services. But the techniques of design management are also effective in implementing any change or improvement. The use of design teams aids in the introduction of new ideas or systems. And the stages of the design management process, at least at the front end, are almost the same for both products and services. As such, design management techniques can be shown to be a benefit for MBA courses.

However, it is still quite unusual to find design management in a standard MBA in the UK. When it is offered as an optional module, the take-up tends to be low. Again, students are not convinced of the usefulness of the topic. Design is still thought of as something to do with aesthetics, and why should they bother to learn how to manage that?

When design management is included as a compulsory module or part of a module, it tends to be more successful. Although some students will be initially reluctant, a good lecturer can win them over in the very first lecture-perhaps by demonstrating to them that their purchase of a car, a CD player, or even a packaged vacation was very likely the result of that product's design. He or she can then go on to explain that "design" includes servicing, availability, and disposal. This leads to a discussion of the multidisciplinary nature of design and how that aspect makes design training an asset in managing people from many disciplines-which is necessary if a company wants to develop successful products. Once the lecturer has convinced the students of this, the rest should be plain sailing.

As far as resources for the lecturer are concerned, there is already a fair body of knowledge within professional practice, though more needs to be done to draw it out of the minds and the archives of practitioners and document it for reference and teaching purposes. Unfortunately, most design management courses appear to ignore such work, preferring to reinvent the wheel. This wastes resources and undermines previous work. Professional academics have a responsibility to research, acknowledge, and build on the work that has gone before. Moreover, advisers on course steering committees, as well as external examiners, must set demanding standards and ensure proper focus on key design management issues, particularly at the corporate level.