Different Flavors of Design Management

DMI News & Views — View­points — An insight into design man­age­ment edu­ca­tion in the UK: Lessons to be learned

A lot of peo­ple keep ask­ing me what I want to do when I grad­u­ate from SCAD, and I keep say­ing the same thing: “I’m not exact­ly sure what I want to do yet, but I have a gen­er­al idea. I want to have more of a lead­er­ship role in design and branch out to solve prob­lems beyond just the realm of graph­ic design.”

For any­one who is curi­ous, I found this great dia­gram that dis­plays the many areas of design man­age­ment, all encom­passed, of course, by design think­ing. The accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle exam­ines design man­age­ment edu­ca­tion in the UK, par­tic­u­lar­ly focus­ing on the dichoto­my of the term design man­age­ment and how that has cre­at­ed hur­dles for the dis­ci­pline in the past.

“…the com­bi­na­tion of the words design and man­age­ment does design man­age­ment a real dis­ser­vice. Design schools are not keen on man­age­ment, which is often asso­ci­at­ed with con­trol and putting things into box­es, there­fore exclud­ing any breath­ing space and cre­ativ­i­ty. At the same time, some man­age­ment and busi­ness schools are not ful­ly con­vinced about design, which often is linked to, and under­stood as, just mak­ing things look pret­ty.”

There are so many dif­fer­ent ways to look at and approach design man­age­ment, and it is con­stant­ly chang­ing and expand­ing. This means that cur­ricu­lum for design man­age­ment varies by school as do the back­grounds of all the stu­dents.

I def­i­nite­ly won’t know exact­ly what I want to do any­time soon, con­sid­er­ing I have not even start­ed class­es yet. I’m also assum­ing I will mod­i­fy my direc­tion through­out my career. With all the dif­fer­ent fla­vors of design man­age­ment, I’m keep­ing my options open.