This week we are to explore how the design process could be fitted in to all levels of management.
After the lecture I went a lil’ browsing online & found a paper written by Serkan Gunes titled : Design Entrepreneurship in Product Design Education.
“…reutilization of innovation frequently embodies as a practice of new product design yet design include the discovery and creation of new kinds of consumer goods that covers creative thinking, planning and also brand, identity, packaging, color, finish and materiality, form, and user experience; in sum values for consumers. The amount of contribution of designer in value creation process has been a controversial issue for a long time; on the other hand, there is a very large pool of empirical studies promoting design and its result as added value in the literature.”.
All the materials I have gone through had me thinking about myself working a Graphic Designer and the fact of how differently we think & conceptualize compared to lets say…the big boys sitting in the top office at the college I work at : 3 day discussions with no conclusions what so ever and some real BS decisions, all so obvious during the pandemic. (I don’t think I should get in to details, maybe) AND sitting at the small 4 person design department, we always seem to make a lil’ more sense, coming up with solutions the 4 of us would agree on during our lunch chats.
But having talked to Chung Lik Lai, acting as a major board member at the school. Although vague but I do come to understand that as a fairly big education organization there are difficulties in driving every one in one direction and that some things are “not as easy as they sound like”. It gave me an abstract kind of realization that a big place is no fun to run nor manage.
A story stuck to my mind when I was really young: A line of kids first started to pass a chicken egg and by the end of the line the last kid would be told it’s a dinosaur egg. This has always made me strive away from big places, to be honest I never heard of any big places keeping their staff generally happy, and for me : I’ve been longing for a place to happily work at…but that might only exist in my dreams. A big place gets big productions done, but it always seems like that can only work with a dictator fully in charge and is willing to look in to the many aspects no matter big and small within his/her realm.
SO, now that I am preparing to start my own studio, I wish to be a fair employer & I do not want my operation to blow up to anywhere above 20, I wish to practice design management in a controlled environment & that all plans & budgets could be visable, I think my experience working in an extreme traditional setting really turned me off and has showed me how badly it works. Seriously, this is no rant on how bad or how upset I am to nor have my contract renewed (in the matter of fact im kinda glad now to leave this behind me), having had the opportunity last week to meet and talk to a couple other staff ranging different departments from social work to airline to the administrative staff, everybody knows they are to lose their jobs sooner or later, everybody talks about the lack of support, resources contradicting to the fact taht they recognise themselves as an established institution while rarely any body in Hong Kong has heard of this college.
(I have said too much already)
This I think is a summary of the levels and a brief perspective of what design thinking could bring to a company operation and the most valueable part in my opinion, is the designer’s ability to think from the user’s perspective & the fact that the main part of our practice is to deliver to the user.
As designer wanting to be owners, I think it is important to first read more and learn about the many aspects of managing business, but most of all : talk to people. SO many useful contacts and advice could be pulled from the many surrounding us, yet I have left untouched over the years.
ANDY WAS HERE
ANDY was here 🤓 