Design Management

In the recent years there had been tremendous growth in the size and complexity of the projects not only in the construction but across all the sectors with major companies undertaking large complicated multidimensional projects. While technological developments are quiet clear and defined, design developments are not. The formulation of efficient design policies and the management of design is often laden with difficulties for the companies. According to one study, there is acute worldwide shortage of the design specialists of caliber to provide leadership. In the United Kingdom and North America, this is a desperate situation as it is now widely recognized that the principal source of poor design standards is poor management [13].
As mentioned above, with such large complicated and multidimensional projects being undertaken under strict time and budget constrain, design management plays an important role in meeting the deadlines. Most of the companies are aware and understand the importance of design and design management, but in general, design issues are not well understood and practiced, thereby reducing efficiency and thus resulting in the delivery of poor quality projects [12]. Design is all about creativity – creating solutions for the problem.
This means managing design leads to managing creative people, which in itself is very difficult but if standards are to be raised in the industry, the managers have to understand the demands of professional design management. They should know what design is and how it is employed in a particular company. Managers need to understand more about the design process and how the organization should be structured as to give more emphasis on the interactive nature of the design process, so that it can be managed more efficiently and effectively.

The aim of the research is to investigate and identify the best practices for design management. To accomplish this, a through literature review will be conducted by searching the available books and journal papers in an attempt to discover the main issues in the design process and to describe them with the context of the theme Design Management. Once this had been accomplished, a live case study will be conducted by taking interviews and analyzing the kind of design management being put in place in that organization. Once this had been achieved, it will be evaluated and analyzed in the light of literature review conducted earlier and inferences and conclusions will be drawn.
Before starting with looking for journals and other relevant materials related to my chosen topic, I waited for my supervisor to give me a brief regarding what themes and issues I would be researching on and how to approach them. My search was mostly confined to University of Manchester’s online databases like Scopus, Science Direct, Compendex and Construction Information Services. Apart from this I also referred to dissertation works which had been done in the past, and took a note of research papers and books they have referred to. Also, I am trying to get in contact with Prof. Rachel Cppoer, who is an expert in this field and has done a lot of research in this area.
While trying to find relevant journals and literature, some of the keywords used to run search strings were:
“Design Management”: This being the core area on which the dissertation research is concentrated.
“Design Management” + “Engineering”: This was used to search for papers which are related to design management in engineering context.
“Design Process”: This I used to get an impression of what kind of stages/process does a design goes through and what kind of problems arises.
“Psychology of Design”: What do designers think, or how they work to develop design.
“Design Strategy”: It is what let the firms determine what to make and do, why do it and how to innovate it contextually, both immediately and over long term.
“Engineering Design”: This is the process which helps engineers/designers to develop products. By analyzing this, we get an idea what kind of administrative and technical problems they face.
“Management Tools”: This was used to identify how at present design is managed and what management theories are being implemented.
For any company, to gain a competitive advantage in the market, design management plays a very important role. Design management is not only all about producing a good design, but an efficient design as well. A design which takes into consideration the resources available, ease in manufacturing in a cost efficient manner. The researchers in this paper have analyzed ‘not how much you spent, but how we spend’ in design management.
My reason for choosing this research paper is, that it analyzes how the investment made on design affects the company’s performance and how is this relationship mediated by the design management skills. The researchers in this paper while reviewing the research done by others concluded that the definition of design management can be very specific or very broad, however, everyone has emphasized on the need of certain managerial activities or activities or skills to optimized the design process [9, 10, 11].
Dickson has suggested five design management skills namely – Basic skills, specialized skills, Involving others, Organizational change and Innovation skills [8]. Based on this, a conceptual model was prepared by the researcher. The contention of this model was such that the effect of investment in design on firm performance is mediated by design management skills and was used to test this research by hypothesis on data from Italian and Spanish tiles industry. By this research, the researchers have established that the performance of a firm is enhanced by good design management performance. Design management can be considered as a form of tactic expert knowledge processed by individuals that improve the design process in a company.
Secondly, investing in design is related to design management. It means, to improve design management skills, financial resources are required which need to be invested and which will aim at improving not only management skills but to acquire new designs from external designers, buy new hard wares and software, improving and enhancing on organizational, cultural or strategic factors. Furthermore, the researches concluded that design management plays a significant role in determining the effects of design management on firm performances. It positively mediates the relationship between design investment and performances.
The main reason for selecting this paper is to identify as how the small businesses, manage design. Design Management is one of the most important aspects of any business and directly effects small business performances. This research is all about as to how the small manufacturing and service companies use professional design skills and there approaches for managing product, engineering and graphic design. The author in this journal paper has identified major causes for the design failure as being lack of senior management commitment to design, allocation of insufficient funds to cover cost, incomplete design briefs failing to take into account the user needs and pricing strategy and inappropriate sourcing of design competencies.
The research in this paper supports that for any business to perform, it has to be effectively managed and had to identify that design management requires effective methods of sourcing, briefing and evaluating design. On further analyzing this (literature review) the research team came up with a model which takes into account the whole design management process, from recognizing a need for proper design briefing, sourcing, launching and evaluation. It identifies critical points and suggests as at what stages reviews should be taken to enable full discussion of the implications of the design for resource allocation and subsequent development. This model became the basis on which research was carried out further by taking interviews in 200 different companies and 2 types of companies discerned from the study ‘confident’ and ‘apprehensive’. While the ‘confident’ type had experience with designing, latter had but little awareness of design.
For them factors like strong briefing skills acquired in some different discipline, sourcing and evaluation skills worked in there favor of getting an effective design outcome. Moreover, the success or failure also depends on other issues like cash flow, marketing skills, capital investment etc. The researchers in this paper had limited themselves to small size companies in UK which employs 10 – 20 employees and how they were using professional design skills and there approach to managing products and engineering design. The researchers further points out that many companies are vary of employing professional designers and are still not sure about the commercial outcome of there design investment.
The reason for selecting this research paper is to analyze and understand the problems faced by the designer. What role do organizations play to support good design practice and how this can be used for effective design management. The researcher has tried to establish a theoretical framework for good design practice and how to promote it by job design and design process management and which is based on theories on quality management approaches [1, 2] and job design from industrial psychology.
A good design practice in any organization leads to one’s contentious, attentive and critical way of working in his own task keeping in mind how is it going to affect the others. [3, 4]. Yet there is a failure in interactions with others, designers failing to tell others assumptions they had made, failing to elect needs on schedules of others or not stating exceptional circumstances [5, 6]. To mitigate this framework based on proactive design are developed by the researchers namely – control over the design process, availability and clarity of design relevant information feed back on results and management support. To develop this framework, 19 professions with varying experience were interviewed about their and result were task analyzed based on four criteria of control, clarity, feedback and organizational support [7]
The researchers found out that different kind of problems existed depending on the size of organizations. Large companies managed there design process in an efficient manner. Design was treated as a corporate process which individuals tried to influence, but on the other hand, design relevant information on requirement, trends and technology was available to designers unlike the designers working in small and medium size companies. Medium size companies have a more informal approach to design and are less innovative. The work can be characterized by high level of personal involved by the designers who have access to feed back but in sufficient information, upfront and lacks organizational support.
For small companies or service providers, they always have problem with clarity of design relevant information and feedback and is always dependent on communication with client. From this, it can be concluded that for effective design process and management, feedback is one of the most important aspect that designers should get. Moreover, they should have good briefing about who is involved in the project, what deadlines they have to meet, if any and what is the line of communication for that project.