Thursday, October 11, 2007

Design-driven business

There is today a growing interest in how design thinking can change the way businesses approach their challenges. Design is becoming the new "thing" in some innovative business schools. This is also being recognized in media, see for instance this article in Business Week, and here is one from Financial Times.

I find this development encouraging and am looking forward to the day when there are business programs that fully embrace a design driven approach. I think we are still not there. Even though many talk about design, claim to be design oriented, few have a deeper understanding what it actually means and entails in practical educational settings. It is in relation to this development good to be involved in a program that for several years have developed a strong sense of design and that produces highly skilled interaction design students that are successful on the job market. An education that takes design as the premier approach seriously is still difficult to implement in the existing academic system. This is less a problem for students, it is however a serious problems for any teacher/researcher who want to be true to design as an approach and at the same time have to "live" in a scientific environment with its different measure of success. This is why design in academic environments in many cases loses its true design character and becomes a simplistic and streamlined predefined process that borrows the basic thinking from science, with serious and disastrous consequences.

2 comments:

Kevin Makice said...

On this front, what is Indiana University doing about cultivating this in our own business school? How much communication is there between the Schools of Informatics and Business to exchange some culture?

Unknown said...

And what how does the campus wide design initiative play into the whole thing?