| Managing as Designing: Some Provocations |
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Redefining workspace ecology with design studios
Michel Avital If we reframe managers as designers, then we ought to rethink their entire organizational ecology. One critical element of a manager's performance is his or her workspace. Just as concert halls have an immense effect on the sound of a symphonic orchestra, or the decor of a restaurant has an effect on the dining experience, the administrative workspace similarly affects a manager. The interaction between agent and space has a significant effect on mind-set, performance and creativity. Yet, very little attention is given by managers and researchers to spatial considerations. It seems that the fundamentals of managers' workspace has not changed much since it was envisioned by Max Weber about a century ago as office chambers, or "bureaus," to form the links in a bureaucratic chain. Offices are purposely designed to conduct business, to receive information, to make decisions, to initiate orders, to produce reports, and to provide a source of authority and governance. But the role of a manager is more than an agent of authority and governance. A good manager must also mange relationships, contribute to collaborative efforts, experiment, envision possible futures, plan contingencies, innovate, learn, reflect, and play. Exemplary managers are those that are engaged in such activities in spite of their inhibiting office chambers. Given the dialectics between agent and space, managers will benefit from moving into design studios-a workspace environment that is conducive to exploration, experimentation, design, interaction and dialog. The term design studio connotes with the artist's studio and serves two interrelated purposes: it provides the ground for development of new managerial vocabularies that draw on design act and artistic practices; and it sheds light on the dialectic relationship between work and space. |
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Solving problems we dont know about
Richard J. Boland, Jr. An idea sticks in my mind but I cant recall where I read or heard it. It is that a good design solves many problems including some that had not been thought about. It reminds me of Herbert Simons enigmatic position in his Sciences of the Artificial that although design is a goal seeking activity, our ideal as managers should be to design without final goals. Both of these positions are calling for an openness in the designed object that enables it to cope with issues that emerge after it has been designed. It seems that flexibility, adaptability or related concepts are not very helpful as guides in achieving a design without final goals. They all seem to presume a set of futures to which they can be flexible or adaptive. Modularization with loose coupling and high cohesion, for instance, is a useful approach as long as the range of adaptation is limited. Similarly, an aesthetic judgment of beauty seems to be inadequate, although it must have some role in designs which are enduring. How can a good design without final goals be achieved? |
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Watchmakers, Designers and designers
Geoffrey C. Bowker A standard demonstration of the existence of God some two hundred years ago was proof by design immortalized by the dreary William Paley in his image of the watch: . . . when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive. . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. . . . the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker -- that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use The history of ideas gives the sequel to the story the generation of a range of mechanisms (many used in organization theory in odd configurations) to show that design could occur without Watchmakers. The principal of evolution was codeveloped by natural scientists and political economists to give us natural selection, mutation, punctuated evolution and selfish genes deploying game theory. There is an alternative set of responses also deployed in organization theory that doesnt offer an alternative to the Watchmaker but changes the description of Watchmakers (and hence gods, visible hands and such). The Designer is perceived as working within a community of small d designers a community which includes end users. This point has been made extensively about the design of computer systems, rail networks, beers, houses and such. Howie Becker in Art Worlds reports on the attribution of fame to the studio rather than the individual painter in the Renaissance and questions our association of great paintings solely with the painter. There is by this view no single being whose Word is law. This view suggests that we reconsider the role of the Designer of an artefact in order to understand the social, organizational as well as technical richness and complexity of her work. |
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Redesigning organizations for future generations
Hilary Bradbury Today growing consensus is emerging that our economic and organizational structures are not sustainable. Quite simply, our organizations are increasingly at odds with our environmental and social ecologies. Is it possible that those who were excluded from the original design of organizational structures could offer input for the re-design of more sustainable organizational forms for future generations? Traditional organizational structures have been patriarchal, i.e., privileging mens/masculine over womens/feminine values and design prerogatives. It therefore seems possible that the design criteria of women may offer something unique to the necessary task of re-design. A research question that explores this issue asks how might women redesign our organizations for future generations? A group of women executives and consultants from diverse companies and industries regularly convenes to discuss how best to contribute to sustainable development, i.e., organizational life within our ecological carrying capacity. In bringing the research question to this special group, as a thought experiment, our conversation can draw both on participants reason and reverie, allowing for productive conversations about how organizations might be redesigned. Insights from this evolving conversation will include identification of key leverage points for redesigning organizations for future generations. |
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Richard Buchanan Professor and Head of the School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University I have noticed that most of the provocations posted on the site are actually position statements. Instead of following this practice, I would like to begin with some observations and questions. I hope they are provocative for our meeting. o Why is any change needed in management practice or education? What are the problems that require new approaches? Don?t managers make good decisions now? How can their decision making be improved through an understanding of the concepts and methods of traditional or new design thinking? o Management education today is based on the study of specialized subjects. Students learn the analytical methods that are appropriate to those subjects, but they do not learn the skills of integrative and synthetic thinking that will be needed in the work environment. o What are those integrative skills and can design help to clarify them? o If we strip away the narrow skills of design that are specific to different areas of application, what broad disciplines of design thinking remain? Are those disciplines of thinking applicable to the area of organizational processes? What specific skills of design emerge in the application of design to human interactions and organizations? o Can the studio approach of design education and design practice contribute something that is missed in the "case method" of business education? o The typical MBA degree program today produces managers who know little about the products and services that are a significant part of business success. How can an understanding of design and product development change this situation? And with what consequences? o Traditional design has focused on graphics and artifacts or physical objects, whether small or large. New forms of design focus on human interactions and human systems. What can the new forms of design practice contribute to management? o Is management education about to undergo a transformation that is similar to the transformation that is now underway in engineering education, where there is a move from analysis and theory toward concrete design practice and "making" products? o How does a focus on "making" change the orientation of management? o What is there in the philosophical foundations of design?its basic concepts, methods, and values?that should be brought into dialogue with management? o Do management and design use different words to refer to the same issues? o Why are designers and design firms engaged by a growing number of corporations to provide help in strategic planning? Similarly, why are designers increasingly invited to participate in or facilitate discussions about corporate vision? What perspectives do designers bring that executives find useful in such matters? o If the concept of design is extended to management, how do we get beyond a vague metaphor and turn the connection into concrete actions and processes? How do we move beyond an interesting analogy and turn the o Definitions of design are either descriptive or formal. Here is a formal definition of design: "Design is the human power of conceiving, planning, and making products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose." |
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Bill Buxton Chief Scientist, Alias | Wavefront Inc., Ontario, Canada What interests me these days is that space where architecture, industrial design and human-computer interaction (HCI) intersect. The blurry edges where they overlap provide a rich source for mining new ways of thinking about design. At the superficial level, architecture is concerned with the spaces in which we live, work and play. Industrial design has to do with form aiding function, and style encouraging use, of the objects and tools in our lives. Finally, HCI has had to do with the design of the actual dialogues that we have with a specific type of object, namely interactive computational devices. My first observation is that industrial design is starting to assume some of the properties of architecture. As more and more computation is embedded in the appliances that they design, industrial designers must extend their attention beyond a concern with form, and increasingly focus on behaviour: of the appliance and its user. In many ways, this is what architecture has always done: by the design of a buildings affordances, architecture is as much about the design of social behaviour, as it is with the form of the building within and around which, such behaviour takes place. My second observation is that the trend towards ubiquitous computing and embedded technologies (in buildings and appliances), both architecture and industrial design are encroaching on the terrain previously occupied by HCI. As distinguishable objects, computers will disappear, and be manifest simply as components embedded in the more general ecology of our physical environment. My third observation is that if we want to get a first glimpse of where the architecture of our offices and homes is going, and how smart appliances will integrate and function within smart environments, that we might best look at automotive design. Why? Because this is an environment which is highly structured, and where the designer has control over both the appliances and the architecture. One of the reasons that the automobile will lead is based on my fourth observation: that Wayne Cherry, the head of design for General Motors, has more control over what appliances go into his cars, than Frank Gehry has over any of his buildings. Which leads to a question, rather than an observation: if we maintain a human-centric perspective, and agree that the primary concern in modern design is about human behaviour, aesthetic and pragmatic, then how is the discipline of design to redesign itself to accommodate these overlaps? How can design better ensure that our experiences and behaviours, in living in and among these technologies, is the artifact of conscious and conscientious deign, and not accident. The historian of technology, Melvin Kransberg had three laws:
To which I would add a corollary:
Therein lies the challenge and the responsibility for design in the future. |
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Bo Carlsson Director of Ph.D. Programs and Research; E. Mandell de Windt Professor of Industrial Economics, Weatherhead School of Management; Case Western Reserve University How do you design a public policy (or corporate strategy) when you cannot specify the goal? Public policy makers and corporate decision makers usually assume that they can identify the goals of the entity for which they are responsible, that they have or can acquire the know-how to reach those goals, and that they can therefore design efficient policies and procedures. These assumptions hold for most classes of problems. But what if this model is precisely wrong, i.e., what if these assumptions do not hold? How can you make sensible policy or strategy in a non-deterministic, evolutionary, and highly complex world, i.e., a world where the most desirable outcomes are unknown but there may be many possible acceptable outcomes, where change is characterized by both path dependence and unpredictability, and where there are many diverse components, interaction and feedback among components, and multiple dimensions to each problem? This is the design problem with respect to public policy. What are the terms and concepts what is the vocabulary useful to describe public policy or corporate strategy as a form of design? |
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The dynamics of studio laboratories in the information economy
Michael Century First a story, on the tipping points between freedom and structure. In 1983 I directed the production of one of John Cage's most radical 'music-circus' compositions (SongBooks). I had followed what I understood of the use of chance operations to make a time line along which all the dozens of singers and players and agents provocateur would occur. Glorious pandemonium (I thought). When Cage showed up to the dress rehearsal, he listened with a big smile on his face for the whole 90 minutes, and at the end laughed infectiously: "very amusing, but this wasn't my piece. . ." What was wrong? He explained how each of the temporal units was to have its own autonomous placement, I Ching determined assignment within the whole span of time, with no regard to any of the other parts. Recast, this opened up different sonic densities, silences, physical collisions, open spaces; but more important, it made each player more radically autonomous and attuned to grasping the unexpected arrival of simultaneous new moments. But note: there is no improvisation here, Cage opposed self-expression ego-freedom; his was to be (but was it really?) a technique of selflessness. Anyway, mine had been a naively ordered (top down) sought-for freedom; the Cagean music-circus is not that, but a highly structured, yet emergent anarchy. My research over the past few years has looked at the transition from analogue to digital techniques for producing animated art, wondering how in detail it came about that digital came to be (seem) 'better' than the established analog methods. This has me to re-construct the primordial scenes of first contact where the early creative users of computer graphics (mostly experimental artists) negotiated with designers to codetermine the computer as a graphical time machine. Studying these experimental sites of the 1960-70s has opened up a wider research program on the genealogy of these hybrid 'studio laboratories', where new art and new techniques are co-created. The dynamics of these peculiar institutions, whose scope is an expanding if not constitutive feature of the 'information economy', seem to me a lot more relevant to the general question of 'managing by designing' than analogizing from the practices of any particular art form. Lots more to say about that, but to close on a tantalyzing image: two drawings by Paul Klee, illustrating what he imagined to be the structure and form of the Bauhaus. The first, in 1922, from Weimar: organic, circular, holist; the second, from 1928, from Dessau: schematic, functionalized, rigidified. What happened between the time Klee made these two drawings? What might we learn (about sites for co-determination of techniques and uses) by understanding the struggles and negotiations that led to the 'normalization' he depicts?
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Be Prepared to Condemn Bad Designs and Their Designers
Chung Po-yang (Alias Po Chung) Besides developing the importance of design skill as a leadership and management competency, another vital issue to discuss is: How do we judge the good designs from the bad designs---the quality of the stuff the designers create and good designers from bad designers? It is imperative that this workshop develops the language to discuss measure and condemn bad designs. Because in my experience managers dont like to do it and they are color blind to it. I approach this challenge with an argument: we cannot separate a person from his thinking patterns. Systems, structure and processes are created by people and these products will carry the designers DNA. Therefore, when we select a person to be the designer/manager to design systems, structures and processes---particularly those to direct, control, motivate workers---what criteria do we use to select such a person? More importantly, what quality should we look for in this category of person and how should we shape them? We created business schools to design leaders and managers. How do we design a system to design the designer? How do we select and educate our new leaders, with this new language about management? As we approach this issue keep in mind the question facing the entrepreneur as the organization they founded grows in size. Why do supposedly profit-maximizing organizations become complex, when this plainly destroys value? We cant develop a language for design if the language cannot be used to distinquish good designs from bad designs and good designers from bad designers. |
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Design/Desire
Claudio Ciborra Design as an input; design as problem solving; a cognitive theory of design; design as ordering; designing tacit knowledge? Cognitive science is alive and well and dominates our views of designing and managing. What if design has to do with desire, with a longing and an act of improvisation? What if designing as improvising is a more a mood than a program, albeit a situated one? Germane to design are then the other moods, out of which design struggles to emerge, distance itself and contrast: panic; boredom; melancholia; joy and other states of accomplished or frustrated desire. Moods shape the way we set the problem and the ways we go around to solve it. Moods are the internal clock of the improvisations which underlie design: the time of the designer in the situation; the kairos or moment of vision which seem to elude the clocks of cognition. |
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Shaping the decision (nee design) environment
Fred Collopy Novice designers do not appreciate that experts have control over the shape of the design environment itself. Experts are not more imaginative than novice designers. The tools they design [to aid them in the process of designing] help them to think of things they would not normally imagine. Being able to control the shape of ones design environment facilitates the mind-stretching we associate with creative activity (Gargarian, p. 80). If we think of managers as administrators or problem-solvers, we will attempt to provide them with information and analytic techniques that are adequate to the tasks they are likely to face. That is, we will tend to design systems that are focused, easy to use, and clean. The fourth generation query and executive support systems movements of the 80s and 90s, for example, can be understood in these terms. Systems were devised that allowed executives to drill down as deeply as they wished into the corporate data. Those systems were often comprehensive, easy to use and clever. But they were, by and large, ignored. Ackoff anticipated the rejection of such systems in his 1967 Management Misinformation Systems paper where he argued that managers should not use systems that they dont understand. I wonder if we might not press this further to assert that managers should not rely upon tools that they have not in some sense themselves designed. |
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Sound design
Nicholas Cook If you want sound design, music's the place to look! All right, it's a bad pun (and 'sound design' has a specialized meaning in electroacoustic music), but it's not just a bad pun. Music is perhaps the most explicitly-theorized of the arts - hence music theory's reputation for old-fashioned formalism (though is formalism necessarily old-fashioned?). And music theory has its origins in historical milieux where the relationship of individual to society was particularly contested; it takes no more than a literal reading to see this relationship as the mainspring of the work of, for instance, Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). But I can think of only one case of a music theorist explicitly borrowing an image from management: it's when Carl Schachter (the leading present-day exponent of Schenkerian theory) distinguishes between 'theoretical' and 'real' structures in music by drawing an analogy with what happens to corporate hierarchies when a secretary sleeps with a At this point the relationship between theory and practice becomes confusing. Traditionally theory has been seen as itself the top of a hierarchy, with practice at the bottom: theory somehow trickles down into practice. But of course theory itself is a practice, and in the case of music it's a verbal practice that runs in parallel with musical practice (and remember, parallel lines never meet). The provocative thought is: in that case, what are the links between theory and practice? We have theory, but do we have a theory of how theory relates to practice? And whereas music's notorious ineffability makes this parallel, never-meeting relationship inescapable, is it different in any other area of social practice? |
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Learning to be an outstanding manager by design
Frances Cort The majority of MBA and other graduate programs created to prepare managers for upwardly mobile career tracks have little or no deliberate design built into the overall delivery and organization of the management skills and concepts which managers need to master. To the extent there is design in the traditional management learning process, it is often oriented toproduction facility, rather than learning outcome. As a result, most MBAs are on their own to connect the dots between what they have learned and the world they will enter where the ability to proactively design a fabric of concepts and action and creative re-engineering -- will be critical. The typical management education design -- ribbons. The courses run parallel to each other, without any formal integration. The alternate typical management education design --Brickwork. The courses weave in and out throughout the curriculum, so that students learn different concepts from each discipline in a just in time format.
The proposed management education design an outcome-oriented, integrated and artful pattern for learning concepts, skills, and critical thinking insights. This design abandons the constraint of separated learning bricks to prepare more creative managers for a dynamic organizational environment. The essential concepts indicated by the colors of the ribbons are still there, but as part of a much more integrated and dynamic design. First, create a design that reflects the flow of inputs, processes and outputs of an organization. Learning will take place in the context of the human, financial and physical inputs which create the entity and the value-added strategies and processes that make the organization function to produce valuable output in the form of products and/or services. Next, integrate into the basic design the external factors that will have an impact on the flow of the organizations activities and value chain. Finally, design into the new pattern a series of delivery systems that will enhance and develop the critical thinking and EQ skills that every management graduate should have mastered (or begun to master) action learning, self-paced technology mediated learning, case discussion, self-assessment, skill development.
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Management by design or management by default?
Barbara Czarniawska Management theory has close links to engineering, political sciences and economics. All three are design-oriented, not to say design-obsessed. They believe in forcing things, people and money flows into places and times where designer wants to have them. Although there are no doubt elements of design in management, like in life in general, the successful practice of management, as I see it after 30 years of studies in four countries, can be described with help of following terms:
Although calling these three interlinked processes "managing by default" is a hyperbole, provocations thrive on hyperboles. My contention is that design should be left to designers, whereas managers should turn to the three processes mentioned above, thereby offering service and support to designers worth their names. |
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Sandra Dawson KPMG Professor of Management Studies and Director of the Judge Institute of Management Studies and Master of Signey Sussex College, Cambridge University In thinking about Managing as Design I am taking examples of projects, products, markets and organisational arrangements which I have encountered in a landmark business school building (which I inhabit), a business school (in which I share the leadership), a contemporary dance (created by my daughter), a car and bicycle (which I own and use), an NGO (which I support) and an airline (which I use as a customer). I thought I had more experience of managing in that I manage in a complex organisation and network of relationships, a part of my business is management education and I am a scholar/commentator on the art and science of management. Yet I found that when I set managing besides design there were strong analogues one with the other. In what ways? They can each be seen as: Creating form and function, within some notion of a purpose. But beyond? They imply symbolism and value. But beyond? They convey authority and legitimacy. But beyond? They embody creativity (the new) and memory (the past). But beyond? They construct everyday experience, create and constrain the future and leave a legacy. If the purpose of the workshop is to bridge the vocabularies of design and management, my thoughts suggest that such a bridge is unnecessary, because the activities and language of design and managing are the same? That is, a set of cognitive, rational, emotional and intuitive individual skills, which are given greater utility through their display and interaction in groups with a membership of diverse, but not random, talents and skills, and their map upon some sort of created structure in the context of a purpose. What do these thoughts mean for management education and practice? One should:
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| Forms and functions of corporate integration
Niels Dechow Enterprise Resource Planning systems promote that corporations will be more effective and efficient if they integrate operations and administration by means of one information system. ERP systems promise that corporations can design the form and function of corporate integration by a few structuring tools that give optional focus on the management of work, performance, boundaries and resources. However from looking into organizational ways of working with this technology, it appears that ERP technologies are not sufficient to design the form and function of corporate integration. The form and function of corporate integration depends on the ability to mobilize corporate integration in ways that make technology networkable with non-technical issues. Paradoxically it appears that strong approaches often only exploit technology in partial ways for the design of corporate integration. They dont rely on the system tools that could result in a generic design of form and function. Instead they explore ways of making the function of the ERP system distinct in a form of corporate integration that networks technologies and societies. Hereby they promote the idea that technology can enhance corporate management in ways that are less techno-deterministic and more creative than approaches that lag behind and tend to confine their ideas about corporate integration to the form and function of the ERP-system itself. |
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Designing the bicycles that we are riding
David Deming As a CEO of an art college that has existed for 120 years, designing change has its built-in hurdles. The classic saying, "We are designing the bicycles that we are riding," is appropriate for most educational institutions. One cannot stop riding while the institution is reinventing itself; however, strategic thinking throughout an institution can produce a clear path toward the transition from the current position through a paradigm shift. Designing as a leading element of structure in management allows leadership and management the tools and direction required to design necessary change whether it be in the communications throughout an institution or in its basic understanding and implementation of its mission and goals. Managing as designing allows for the manager to truly focus on the goals and purpose of the organization. It places clear responsibility, whether individual or shared, and requires accountability for actions taken. Creative ideas can be challenged and tested through a well-crafted and designed process so that the management and stakeholders understand the fullest ramifications of an implemented idea. Strategies for implementation and evaluation must be designed in order to assure reasonable accountability for how a new idea or program is succeeding or failing. |
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Paul Eickmann Provostand Vice President for Academic Affairs, Cleveland Institute of Art The premise of this workshop is that the disciplines of management and design should be newly conceived--reborn in a symbiotic relationship in which management draws on the principles of design. The goal of my contribution is to probe this new concept of management as design and to see how it actually plays out in my own professional environment. I am querying manager/designers in my workplace--the Cleveland Institute of Art--as to how this interdisciplinary vision speaks to them. What principles of design do leaders in an art school integrate into their management practices? How does their administrative problem-solving inform their design work? Given that management is largely understood as focused directly on people, while design is understood as relating to objects and spaces, how deeply can this new interdisciplinary vision really penetrate? Is the main link between the disciplines the focus on problem-solving that the two share? To what degree might local managers and designers feel that the strong disciplinary separation between the fields of management and design is wholly appropriate, or even necessary to advance progress in each one? My presentation aims to integrate my colleagues' diverse ideas on management as design into a unified approach to the issue. |
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Is designing holistic or part of a staged process?
Paul Eickmann Alice Kolb David Kolb The Art Academy of Cincinnati, The Cleveland Institute of Art, and The Columbus College of Art and Design have begun a longitudinal outcome study of artistic learning. Our position statement will report results of baseline studies of the learning styles of visual artists; comparing them to the learning styles of MBA students. Learning styles of design majors will be compared with other visual arts majors. From the perspective of experiential learning theory we will describe how managers and artists learn. Preliminary findings indicate that artistic learning differs significantly from discursive, text driven management education. It's focus is on showing and recursive practice. These studies raise an interesting question in the design specialty. Is designing a holistic process or is it one stage in a larger adaptive process such as Simon's three stage learning cycle, intelligence-design-decision? Our first study of BFA graduates supported the latter position indicating significant differences in the learning style of design majors in comparison with fine art and craft majors. Design majors were more abstract and goal oriented while fine arts majors were more concrete and reflective. Craft majors were more concrete and active. A subsequent study of BFA graduates supports the notion that design itself is a holistic process. Design majors showed a balanced learning style that involves concrete and abstract and active and reflective learning modes. |
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Producing visions and producing decisions
Yrjo Engestrom Managing as designing can be understood as production of visions and production of decisions. The challenge is to bring these two into fruitful interplay with one another. When that happens, when envisioning and decision making are dialectically intertwined, we see the potentials of management as design unfold. Managers construct visions by debating with their colleagues, with their consultants, and with themselves. Managerial envisioning is essentially argumentative history making. Writing mission statements, brainstorming and scenario work are seemingly clear-cut examples of such argumentative history making. The problem with these types of discourse is that they tend to be separated from practical actions of decision making. The effect is well known: mission statements and scenarios do not easily translate into practice. In a sense, these types of discourse have an inherent tendency of becoming glorified small talk: big words with small consequences. Correspondingly, daily management decisions are often poorly argued but have big unintended consequences. History is made as if behind the backs of the makers. What does it take to create management team meetings which combine off-line argumentative envisioning with on-line consequential decision making? I argue that it requires two kinds of anchoring: anchoring up and anchoring down. These two kinds of anchoring typically entail two different kinds of language, epistemic actions, and representational tools. Bringing these two types of resources together in hybrid arrangements generates processes and outcomes that were not known ahead of time a hallmark of good design. Anchoring up relies on paradigmatic language: explicit concepts, models, and historical analysis. Thus, anchoring up visions means asking for their historical potential, while anchoring up decisions means asking for their systemic consequences. Anchoring down relies on narrative language: cases, stories, and ethnography. Anchoring down visions means asking how they will be implemented and how they speak to the contradictions presently experienced in the organization. Anchoring down decisions means asking how they will affect and resolve problems in the organization here and now. We may represent managing as designing in terms of a cognitive field, schematically depicted in Figure 1. Argumentative history making involves clashes, contrasts, negotiations and trading between the four sub-fields.
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Purposes in liue of goals; enterprises in liue of things
Jurgen Faust To achieve quality of design in a management environment we have to organize the movement and not the shape. Id like to propose Josephs Beuys' (1921-1986) theory of sculpture as a basis for a theoretical model I have developed and introduced into the realm of design processes. Quality of design in this sense refers to the openness of an archetypal design process. Although within the archetype, we cannot define a goal, the design process has to have a purpose. The distinction between a goal and a purpose seems to me very important. A goal is a clearly defined target or the object of ones effort and a purpose is an intention, which always implies an openness, and includes the concept of a creative angle. It allows for changing the goal within the design process, without losing the momentum of direction. As we think about new vocabulary, we must raise the very question of the new. Do we have to create new terms or should we rethink and examine the existing terms? Using existing design vocabulary, emerging as it does from product design or even from communication design, is questionable. To design as managers we have to keep in mind that we are not designing a traditional product in the sense of an object or in the sense of a message, which has to be communicated. If we design as managers we have to know what our purpose is. Must we achieve a certain amount of profit? Do we want to maintain a certain form or structure? Do we have to manage the flow or must we keep the enterprise healthy? The way we think and construct an enterprise is the key to the result; since Heisenberg, we know that the outcome of our research is the result of our methods and questioning. I would add that it is also the result of the language and the metaphors we apply. There are many ways to construct a model, but in most the generating image behind the idea drives the conception. My idea and my intuition say that an enterprise is a living being of the highest order, which has to be lively and flexible enough to change its form in order to achieve its purpose. Such an enterprise has to have senses to perceive and to think; it has to have rhythmic circulation processes and an adequate metabolism. Such a model has to include an entity that is bigger then the parts which belong to it. At this point we discern a major difference between the traditional design process of an object or information and the design process envisioned here. The management design process contains a social community, which has to be actively included to design the whole. |
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A new social architecture
Lee Fisher Managing as designing is best exemplified by the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery who said, A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. Managing by design means managing so that members of the team can always see the cathedral - the bigger vision - just outside their window. A great manager tells stories and conveys images that allow members of their team to feel and envision a purpose beyond the immediate task at hand. In the nonprofit and government contexts, I have found that managing as design has meant trying to design a new social architecture for how society uses its resources to help vulnerable and at-risk populations. As Bill Shore notes in The Cathedral Within, cathedrals, through their stained-glass panels, statues, and paintings were intentionally designed to convey stories and values to people who were otherwise illiterate. Managing as designing means that there are many filters through which we view the vision. Figure out what is fundamental to your vision, and do not compromise on that; but be flexible on everything else that is not essential to the vision. Make all decisions with the ultimate vision, or design, in mind. Shore summarizes cathedral building as follows:
Another way to view this concept is to see managing through the perspective of James Collins and Jerry Porras, authors of Built to Last. They note that visionary companies distinguish their timeless core values and enduring purpose (which should never change) from their operating practices and business strategies (which should be changing constantly in response to a changing world). A good manager spends more of his/her time thinking about organizational design than specific product lines and market strategies. A great manager tells a story that, as Howard Gardner states in Extraordinary Minds, envelops the audience in its own quest. |
| Corporate communication as redesign: Visual expression as corporate reality
Tim Fogarty Julia Grant Gary John Previts The corporate communication effort is a vital element in managerial success. Convincing external constituents of the vitality, potential and legitimacy of an enterprise is a process that secures the continuing flow of resources to an enterprise by affecting market perception of its output, performance and image. Our workshop research follows from studies such as Basil Yameys Art and Accounting, [Yale University Press, l989], in that our consideration of the visual/graphic/pictorial elements of modern annual reports represent a critical expression of the modern enterprise. We present arguments which support a view that communication efforts may shape the image of the enterprise not in unrepresentative ways, thus portraying a redesign of the entity. To assess the propensity toward redesign we will consider:
In considering these issues, the vocabulary of corporate communication will be considered as a principal element in conveying the meaning of design. |
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Leading as Designing, Leaving the Familiar Path to Find the Successful Path
Ronald G. Fountain Through many years as both a finance executive and a management consultant, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. The primary objective of any organizational renewal process should be to achieve well-defined outcome improvements in the target organizations performance. However, all too often organizations are focused instead on clinging to historical patterns of practice even when it is clear that such commitments are seriously and fundamentally flawed. The hope seems to be that manipulating familiar systems will ultimately result in less chance of failure, considered to be success. The difference between managing familiar organizational processes and leading the same organization to achieving its objectives through designing and implementing outcome-focused processes is an important one. Sound process management as a method to achieve improvement implies managing an extant processes in new and creative ways. The hope is that by doing good things, good things will happen. Often an increase in goodness is what occurs though such an improvement alone does not define success. Just doing good things from a process perspective is quite different than leading an organization through newly designed methods to achieve the right objective or outcome. What is really needed are fresh methods designed and applied in new ways to achieve targeted objectives. Unfortunately, simply employing established processes that have worked in other situations, even in new ways seldom works as a path to achieving desired outcomes. A more effective approach might be to lead the organization down new paths to achieve its defined and desired outcomes. This most often includes designing a system of actions and interactions focused on outcomes more than it does massaging existing processes. Implicit in an approach to achieving organizational excellence through leading as designing is the willingness of both leaders and participants alike to engage in practices that are more uncertain and less familiar. The hope and expectation is that these newly designed approaches that involve leaving the path, are more likely to produce well-defined results. In order to depart from the familiar Path, followers must have confidence in and be willing to place their trust in unfamiliar but thoughtful leadership styles. They must also trust those who practice these evolving styles. When that trust is well placed in leading as designing, more appropriate outcomes are likely to occur. |
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Sense-making and randomness
Les Gasser John Cage is well known for his use of chance as an organizing principle for music. Familiar pieces such as "Radio Music" (1956) or "4'33" (1952) seem to depend on chance for their effect and for their formal aesthetics. And to many audiences they seem like jokes, noise, or anti-music. Cage himself didn't really see chance itself at the center of the issue. The experience of randomness for him was a secondary outcome of a more primary strategy, which we could call "direct engagement". (See for example Cage's comments in the videotape of his collaboration with Merce Cunningham, "Points in Space".) Cage's direct engagement compositional strategy placed the performers and the audience together in close, continuous, and localized relation with the immediate activity of the world at the time and place of making music (or more generally, designing action)--noises in the concert hall, programs on the radio. The deep relation of performer, instruments (technologies), action, time, and place is fundamentally and by definition unique and chance-based, not patterned---the more so the deeper the level of engagement. So for Cage, the *experience* of randomness results from the *strategy* of direct engagement. Among other things, I'm struck by the contrast to Max Frisch's perspective on technology as "the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it." Cage challenged and rearranged the technologies of musical generation (instruments), presentation (the concert hall), performance (as a social technology) and notation (musical scores) by turning them toward more direct experience, not less. One of the challenges in a "Cagean" situation is meaning-making---aesthetic response---in the process. How can we craft an aesthetic (or design) strategy in which a kind of coherent sense can be made from chance events? The issue is doubly perplexing since sensemaking is normally linked with the experience of patterns, and sensibility is normally expressed using patterned media such as language, design representations, design patterns, etc.) Does the question of sensemaking even make sense when we intentionally work with and engage with experience as randomness? How can we organize and communicate about the kinds of engagements that deeply incorporate randomness---structuring, designing, and managing them, when many or most notational systems (e.g., musical notation, language, org charts, design documents) are make their own sense via pattern and repetition, and when some of their main functions are preservation of structure, and persistence over time? How can we capture and work with directly-experienced community knowledge in our technical and organizational practices, in cases when that knowledge is seemingly 'random' from the perspective of design and history? |
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Organizational design as landscape gardening
Pasquale Gagliardi In spite of the growing awareness that organizations are living cultural-bearing milieux, most often organizational designers conceive of their job as the logical arrangement of productive practices according to criteria of instrumental rationality: the object of their work is viewed as a mechanism, an artefact made out of inert components, or as an organism capable of adapting itself to its environment according to invariant biological laws. Looking at organizations as expressive forms and systems of meaning should radically modify the theory and the practice of organizational design, along the following main lines. Design as Dialogic Exploration. Since no abstract design can handle the complexity of corporate life, the organizational order never arises solely out of a preordained rational project. We cannot go on thinking of design as an intellectual activity, an exercise of mind which precedes the concrete creation of a cooperative reality. More appropriately, design must be seen as a social process and as a dialogic exploration during which differing views of the world, cognitive maps, strategies and interests are set against each other and mediated. The designer is thus only one of the actors on the scene. Patterns of Organizational Relations and Deep-seated Structures. In common organizational language the structure to be designed is mainly viewed as a system of tasks and roles which can be formally communicated and consciously learnt. Apart from these patterns mediated by mental experiences, there exist other and deeper factors working for regularity and persistence in time: these factors, mainly mediated by sensory and emotional experiences, are basic assumptions, shared values, ways of feeling embodied in the organizational field. This field is then at the same time a physical and symbolic ground whose properties and contours are defined by artefacts. Physical space and the material artefacts which populate it constitute a dimension that the designer of organizations generally ignores, regarding it as the territory of other professions efficiency experts, architects and interior designers. But space and artefacts can be made to structure relationships, stabilize distinctions between activities and social groups, reinforce behaviour patterns, administer contradictions. They constitute alternate communication systems to language, and represent the emblematic manifestations of a socially constructed reality. The Interplay of Physical, Symbolic and Social Structures. This expansion of the object to be designed should suggest to the designers of organizations possibilities of coherent intervention on multiple aspects of the setting whose importance they may perhaps have been unaware of, but at the same time it should make them conscious of the complexity of their task and of the limitations of their power. They could then conceive of the organization as a garden, and of their role as that of landscape gardeners. The garden designers work with living elements whose characteristics and predispositions they are concerned to know but whose finished forms they will be able to determine only partially. In a small Italian garden, where harmony is generated by symmetry and the rigour of layout, a box edge may be clipped perfectly square or cut into any shape whatever, but only at the cost of being constantly and scrupulously trimmed. The scale and complexity of modern organizations, however, make the metaphor of the Italian garden inappropriate. More often it is a matter of designing a landscape in which the overall harmony arises out of the fusion of carefully planned elements with spontaneous growth, and where the same care is given to ensuring that structures which can be preordained are given fixed forms as to creating spaces that favour the development of forms whose evolutionary pathways we can only guess at. |
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Groundless management; groundless design
Joseph Goguen I wish to propose two provocations, which, though I believe them both, appear to be in conflict; perhaps this contradiction constitutes a third provocation. (1) Management and design share at least one important property: they are groundless. Let me explain what I mean by this. The literatures on both management and design are characterized by a search for verifiable solutions to important problems, where solutions are envisioned in a manner similar to that of mathematics, physics or (at least) engineering. However, the rapid flow of fads and buzzwords, and the ubiquity of highly visible failures (e.g., Enron and Windows) attest to the lack of adequate progress. Two easily identified difficulties are: to give precise definitions for real problems, and to give realistic metrics for the adequacy of solutions. I wish to suggest that in general, neither of these difficulties has an answer, and that instead of seeking reductionist solutions, managers and designers should learn to live in the groundless world entailed by social reality, rather than the well-founded world that seems to be promised by reductionist science. It seems to me that designers have done a better job of this than managers, and that managers could therefore learn something from designers in this respect. (2) Certain aspects of design can be formalized. My own experience is in the area of user interface design in computer science. The problem here is to design a display that presents some given information and action affordances in a more or less "optimal" way. If each of the source domain of information and affordances, the target domain of interface capabilities, and the quality measure are well enough defined, then the problem reduces to providing what we call a semiotic morphism from the source to the target, which does well on the quality measure. Interestingly, all three of these ingredients are typically more qualitative than quantitative, in that the source and target spaces have structure (described by algebraic theories), and the quality measure is a partial ordering, rather than a linear numerical scale. In particular, the source and target are semiotic spaces, and the designs are semiotic morphisms that preserve as much of the most important structure as is feasible, subject to constraints. It is also intriguing that the conceptual space theory of metaphor and blending (due to Fauconnier, Turner, Lakoff and others) is a special case, and in particular, that blending has a precise mathematical characterization that again lifts to the design of interactive systems. A (perhaps) amusing introduction to the ideas may be found at the UC San Diego Semiotic Zoo and references that are linked to it. (3) A hint of how to avoid the conflict between (1) and (2), is to replace the implicit Platonism of mathematical modeling in general, and of semiotics in particular, by positioning them in social reality, which itself is notoriously groundless. Here I would refer to philosophers like Heidegger and Nishitani for deeper insights into the groundlessness of the human condition, and how to live with it. |
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(Re)design in Management
Julia Grant The artist-designer faces a blank canvas, an uncarved block of marble, a fresh medium that awaits the creative process. The outcome of that design process begins from unformed raw materials and, thus, can become what the designer imagines and is able to create. The typical manager-designer does not have this luxury. The potential within the management context is rarely so pristine. A manager is usually working with a context that already has form. Thus, at a minimum, existing structures must be redesigned simultaneously with the creation of a new design. Or, at an extreme, something must be destroyed before something new can be created.
Imagine Michelangelo facing uncarved marble and creating La Pieta.
In contrast, imagine Philip Johnson facing the completed work La Pieta and trying to create from it his sculpture, Turning Point.
It is this problem that the process of design in management must confront and solve. As something of the artist exists in a sculpture, something of previous human involvement and creativity exists in extant managerial structures. The manager is faced with the problem of destroying and/or redesigning something that others have created, something in which others have invested themselves. This prior investment leads to a stubborn tenacity in existing managerial or operational structures since these structures incorporate commitment, investment, and human emotion, all of which must be reckoned with as part as part of the (re)design process. Out of a discussion of this concept with Colleen Gepperth has come the suggestion for a redesign exercise, in which we could present digital images of well-known works of art in various media. The exercise would be to recreate these works into something else, perhaps into another work of art as in the example herein, or perhaps into the participants own redesign creation. |
| Design of Collaboration Among Firms and Within Regions
Susan Helper In my research on the automotive industry, Ive observed many collaborations between firms, often under conditions that are supposedly hostile to cooperation, such as opportunistic partners. With John Paul MacDuffie (Wharton) and Charles Sabel (Columbia), I have argued firms are drawn into these collaborations because they seek help in advancing knowledge in uncertain times. The firms are aided in this task by adhering to a set of mechanisms that discipline their joint inquiry. We call these mechanisms pragmatic because they systematically raise doubts about existing ways of doing things and suggest new ways of solving problems. These mechanisms include bench-marking, simultaneous engineering, total quality management and the five whys. These mechanisms simultaneously increase learning and reduce opportunities for opportunistic behavior. (For example, if a customer has a stream of quality data from a supplier, it can both help identify persistent sources of defects, and also figure out if the defects are due to opportunism, bad luck, etc.) This connection between learning and monitoring is a key reason for the success of long-term collaborations between Toyota and its suppliers, and perhaps also between Hewlett-Packard and a more volatile group of partners. |
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Management as Medium
Matthew Hollern As we consider the work of artists and designers challenging a medium through the development of form and function, addressing a medium as a material .or a vehicle .or an environment, the space between design and management begins to show analogous potential. To teach art is to teach the discipline necessary to challenge oneself to be the architect of the site and the structure, the product and the process, the concept and the craft. When we recognize management as a medium we begin to reveal the potential to design, to address the process and the product, the constraints as well as the allowances that may challenge the model to take new form. The best design today helps us to see anew the world around us; it transports us to new levels of ability to act and to understand. In higher education we have an opportunity to cross disciplines, to experience new ways of thinking and teaching. Where the educational paradigm shift challenges us to serve as the architects of learning environments rather than maintaining our former roles as a source of knowledge, we begin to see the universal value of design for better process and product. Give a man a fish he will eat for a day . Teach a man to fish he will eat for a life time .Teach a manager to manage .or teach a manager to design? |
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Managing by designing
Keith Hoskin Management is always by design, or so my historical work with Richard Macve would argue, because management (whether viewed as content, process or structure) is a precipitate of disciplinary practices. In content it is an amalgam of expert disciplinary knowledges; as process it is a prescription and enactment of well-disciplined behaviours. As structure, well .we argue that the evidence shows that the first managerial entity was the Western Railroad, which in 1839 introduced that business design success, the line and staff structure. The history can wait for my longer piece, but (trust me!) the pioneer of that structure on the Western, George Whistler (Whistlers Father no less) was only translating into business the structure developed at the place of his learning, the US Military Academy at West Point. Management, to us, is disciplinary through being an amalgam of the disciplinary practices of writing, examining and grading. Those practices were first combined effectively at West Point (though on a French model from the Ecole Polytechnique). This is why all the pioneers of management (trust me again!) are West Pointers of this era (post 1817, under Sylvanus Thayer). It is also therefore to date always a design produced out of writing, examining and grading. And what of design? In a wonderful book no-one knows how to interpret, The Intelligence of a People, the engineering historian Daniel Calhoun points out that around this time boat building, bridge building and sermonising become designed. The blueprint, the use of engineering science, the model, the plan of argument, are all ways of re-writing design to its modern specification. Interestingly one of his pioneers of new bridge building, Herman Haupt, is the greatest figure in the invention of management, on the Pennsylvania Railroad. So there are not necessarily differences where difference is imagined . So management has always been by design, and design is not automatically different, at the level of practices. Two reflections follow. The design that comes from these disciplinary practices is not necessarily the design we want (as the best modern design recognises). However, at least in management, the design we want we are likely not to get, unless we diagnose the power of disciplinary design, and begin unlearning our unthinking adherence to the parameters it sets. |
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The organizing property of premium design arguments
Sten Jonsson Good design does not speak for itself! We do when we experience it. We make meaning by putting the design arguments in context. In this sense design has an organizing property by initiating the generation of discursive objects that relate people to each other. Premium design would build its arguments in relation to core values (not costs) of its audience. The core values that keep a social unit together have been forged in response to historical experience as principles behind successful strategies. Arguments that are based in such values are discursive in the sense that they are co-produced by the author and the reader of the design. The problem of every speaker is that he or she loses control over the meaning of the utterance as soon as it is uttered. A communicative situation is established with the utterance and the hearers go to work putting it into the context of their choice. Speaker intentions may be ignored or may not be detectable. Misunderstanding (from the speakers view) may follow. The speaker can control the sense making work by providing a strong narrative that becomes the preferred context used by hearers. A strong narrative invites to co-production by subjunctivity (Bruner) and implicature (Grice). |
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Paul Kaiser Artist and founder of Riverbed, a digital arts studio A groups communications structure replicates itself in the structure of the works they create together. This loose paraphrase (and possible misreading) of a dictum from the classic Mythical Man-month handbook struck me with the force of a revelation when I first came across it about ten years ago and has been borne out time and again (triumphantly or disastrously, as the case may have been) in the course of my many artistic collaborations. One of the best collaborative models Ive participated in offers a paradoxical and extreme solution: it clarifies the communications structure by annulling it. In the Cage/Cunningham approach, the choreographer, composer, and visual artist all work in complete independence right up to the very last minute, uniting their work only at its premiere on the stage. |
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People mutht be amuthed
John King "People mutht be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a learning, Louis Henri Sullivan said in 1886 that form follows function. This was more of a conjecture than an observation. It was certainly an is/ought confusion. Form probably does follow function much of the time, but that's no reason to conclude that it should do so. Frank Lloyd Wright said that the notion of form following function was a misunderstanding: that form and function "should be one, joined in a spiritual union." Then again, Wright himself said in reponse to complaints that his Unity Temple Unitarian church in Oak Park didn't work well as a church that he didn't give a damn how it worked -- he wanted to build a building that looked like that. I prefer to think that function follows form. This notion is not new. The trope has been around for a while, although not as long as Sullivan's aphorism. Curiously, it shows up most often in the literature of computer science and software engineering, transport systems design, and molecular biology. Why? It has to do with keeping us "amuthed," and in staying amuthed is our salvation. Homo Faber, we are told, is distinguished among the animals by it's use of tools. That is true, except for all the other tool-using animals like ants and sea otters and lots of birds and primates. But how many of those other animals paint pictures of the things tools are used on? Cave paintings and other art dating back tens of thousands of years have been found in the presence of tools. Where is the real inspiration? Is it in the tools or the art? The designed and built world has plenty of functional utility, to be sure. It's a good thing, too, because we need what that world does for us. But that's not really why it's here. It's here because it has been our pleasure to create it. The rest is just justification for those who feel that nothing is worth anything until it is accounted for. |
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The origins of modern control through communicative design
Miriam Levin Literature in the history of technology has treated the relationship between control and communications as a twentieth century phenomenon identified with the design of large electrical power systems, with cybernetics and computers, and with the modern office and factory. Yet, serious discussion of the relationship between control and communications pre-dates the appearance of these systems and technologies by about two centuries and was much wider in scope. Such discussion took place within European societies whose traditional social orders had broken and new social bonds had not yet formed. One way to access these ideas is through writings and projects of several influential men writing in the mid- to late 18th century who were interested in technology as an agent of control via communicative design. I want to propose that these men created a cultural context that defined communications technologies, their function and use in shaping human-machine interactions. Two groups were active in the years 1750 to c. 1790, each with a view of the subject that has remained viable in discussions of communications and control: 1) French philosophes who favored a social and moral conception of technological means and ends; and 2) Adam Smith and classical economists who viewed the relationship in terms of political economy. Each group treated the relationship in terms of three interdependent factors that remain important in discussions of communications technologies: 1) the definition of nature and human nature as mechanistic systems; 2) communication as sensory experience which could be artificially reproduced through physical stimuli; and 3) the possibility of linking humans and machines in space together in an interactive system for specific purposes through the design of communications technologies. I hope to generate discussion about the control and by taking a long duree view of cultural and intellectual history of technology. |
| Creating compelling images of the future
Jeanne Liedtka The field of business strategy is in desperate need of new ways to understand and communicate the purpose and process of business strategy. The tired clichés of roadmaps and blueprints have done little to breath life into what we know to be one of the most significant tasks that a leader charged with achieving institutional change and development faces the creation of a compelling image of the future. Nor have the seemingly endless debates in the academic literature between fit and intent, strategic thinking versus strategic planning, or capability-based competition versus an emphasis on industry structure done much to assist, as well. We stand at the frontier of a business world in the midst of fundamental change, in which much of the traditional thinking about strategy formulation and implementation seem potentially ill-suited to escalating imperatives for speed and flexibility. We need new metaphors that better capture the challenges of making strategies both real and realizable, metaphors that bring life to the human dimension of creating new futures for institutions, that move us beyond the sterility of traditional approaches to strategic planning in large organizations. I argue that what is needed is a resuscitation of an old metaphor that I see as offering new possibilities - the metaphor of strategy as a process of design. Such a focus, I believe, would allow us to see one important goal of strategy formulation as the design of a purposeful space virtual rather than physical in which particular activities, capabilities, and relationships are encouraged. These, in turn, produce a particular set of associated behaviors and hence, outcomes in the marketplace. Theories of design, I assert, have much to teach us about the creation of such spaces. |
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Design in the high
Kalle Lyytinen I will propose two topics that relate to all our conversations of design: our inevitable desire to relate good designs to individual masterminds;and our inevitable necessity to relate most designs in real world with multiple designers and going concerns of several communities. Designing has been always attributed to be an effort deserved for giants of both mind and work. It is done for our amusement by bringing in life the internal demons or Gods of the designer. It involves moments of interruption, revelation, angst and joy where individuals project their understanding and explorations into the external world. It is a dance with of mind with the materials that a designer can grab on: people, artifacts, forms, ideas or space. This concept of design- design in the high- involves breaking the rules, shaping new forms and inventing new functions or capabilities and it covers works of Sullivan, Lloyd Wright, Aalto, Moore, Weber, Sloan or Ritchie and Thompson. This is what most of us think when we pick of a term design in different fields like architecture, sculpture, organizations or software. These people are their "Magister Ludis' of their respective fields. An interesting parallel of this is that in some fields like architecture these new ideas of design become patterned and studied by all the following generations to be expanded, commented and broken while in some other fields like organization design or software such examination of the archeology of design ideas is nearly non-existent and their are now studies or analyses of the evolution of the forms and architecture of the design spaces. There is also much less understanding how grand design ideas become contextualized and localized, or how their evolution depends on the development of sign systems and artifacts which make possible the transfer of knowledge and its recreation. The metaphor of a heroic designer is a faulty image for most "design activities" we see in our every day life in the sense that most real world problems are not amenable to the influence of a clever, original, and omnipotent designer. Most of the design we see is just random tinkering and poor imitation. Most of the design processes do not have the luxury of engaging truly bright people, but operate in a committee work "approach" where the interests of multiple constituencies are balanced. When designing a taxation system, a B2B market place, a transportation system we see a finessed interaction over time of numerous contradictory, messy and poorly articulated design "glimpses" offered by a set of designers where many of them have no idea that they are designing a system. Such interactions may or may not yield designs which can stand against their technical, natural or social enemies- in most cases they fail to do so some of the time. Such design situations emphasize the need to understand contexts of design in the form of history, interests, governance, technologies and skills which are missed in most heroic war stories. This necessitates integration of also these elements in the theorizing about design spaces and movements in the design spaces as a continuous interplay of the context and the design. |
| Spacing design
Jan Mouritsen & Kristian Kreiner It is possible to conceive of design as an ongoing spacing activity. This involves treating design not only as a process but more importantly also as an accomplishment. By this we mean that it is always in the hands of people and technologies that may allow it to float or to drown. It is never alone but always part of some network of things. It is always on the move. Therefore, we need design criteria, which can somehow answer to following question: How can we go somewhere, which we dont know where is, in a systematic way and sense that we have not gone wrong? A design is input. It is easy to fall in the trap that design is the end of a process. If design is an output then is a dead reference of a goal that lies there but does not work and inspire. It is no ambition but a mere goal. Seeing design as input, however, allows us to use it to reflect and indeed to develop an appreciation of how it is possible to in the general direction of where the design takes us. The ambition is here to help to show how the design has to undergo redesign before it can be aligned with others spheres of interest. It is spun in a net of heterogeneous resources. Never take design literally, but always seriously. The design dies when it is not objectionable. Objectionability is a mechanism by which other actors stake their claim. They problematise the design in view of its usefulness in other contexts, and by setting itself out as objectionable, it is fragile, and always in the remake, at least potentially. Design is not a goal or a target but a mechanism to explore how far in time and space a particular phenomenon can stretch. Here, the design process is not only iterative, but more importantly it is an effect of a whole process of assembling allies to the design rather than its very precondition. In this sense, design is an accomplishment where from small initial possibilities it is gradually formed into large networks of efforts and alignment. Innocence If design is a process to find the space it is to be about, there will be numerous agendas that are themselves not quite clear about what they do in this particular situation. Interests are alerted even if they do not quite know what they are supposed to do. Therefore, there is a certain need for a degree of innocence or naivety. If all interests are played across the table always, the conflicts mobilised in the design process will be horrendous. Therefore, the participants will have to relinquish some of their knowledge about the motivations of others and somehow object to only see them in terms of their interests. This implies innocence practice of choosing not to act as if all were self-interested, greedy individuals. Even if we know this is the case, to close off to this insights may be productive. Design can be about anything an organisation, a house, and a financial report. In all instances we attach performativity to design when the object of the design is materialised. When the organisation/building/report is there, then we can ask the question, who is the designer? This is, however, a gross rationalisation that says very little about the whole network of things, paper, people, money, policy and capabilities that all go into constructing the building/organisation/report. Design may not be merely the fulfilment of an aspiration; it may be the effect of a network. For this network to work and evade conflict and thus destruction, it will have to manoeuvre carefully. For this to be possible, it may be important to see it as an input rather than as an output; to take it seriously and yet not literally; and to commit oneself to innocence. |
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Product design innovation model: Big to small to big
John R. Nottingham Product design innovation is far more successful in small organizations than large organizations. In large companies, like General Motors and Procter & Gamble, their best product innovations originated outside these companies, in spite of their large research and development budgets. Typical management structure of big companies does not encourage the career risk inherent in truly creative thinking and instead fosters a reliance on more conservative solutions to product design. If a large company wishes to create the best results in product innovation it should create a Big to Small to Big formula. First it should establish a goal for the innovation. Then a small independent company or group should be established to create, develop and prove initial market success for the innovation. At this point, the large organization can acquire the small entity to maximize the potential of the innovation. This model allows the small entity to do what it does best, create the innovation and allow it to grow, and the model allows the large entity a chance to then transition the innovation into a major, established distribution system. |
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Artifacts scattered about
Joseph A. Paradiso Although my background is in physics and engineering, not in design or management, my current interests and activities at the MIT Media Lab have brought me much closer to art. As design is at a similar juncture, I've had lots of opportunity to collaborate with designers and visit them at their workplaces. One of the major things that one notices there is the way in which a design house often has many artifacts scattered about, from which designers can evolve new ideas and design concepts. Not only their own products, but also interesting designs from competitors are displayed on tables, shelves, cases, etc., and available to pick up and examine. Perhaps an organization's management can also do something similar - e.g., somehow have different management styles, techniques, and structures presented and available for exploration - not just for direct adoption, but also for stimulation in arriving at totally new management structures that can fill particular needs. |
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Design vs. operational roles in addressing a meta-design challenge
Alan Preston Revenue authorities commonly have central roles formed around revenue collection, law interpretation, revenue distribution and tax system design. So their "managing of designing" should, in principle, offer a distinctive perspective on "managing as designing". Yet how well do revenue authorities comprehend, let alone lead and manage, their design role, which is so different to their other (operational or technical) roles? Two years ago, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) began addressing the meta-design challenge of redesigning its tax design practice to provide an integrated taxation design (ITD) capability. What stands out in that experience is the leadership challenge of appropriately framing the tax design task. The discipline of design commended itself to us as highly relevant to building that ITD capability. But without the significant contributions of our design mentors (Richard Buchanan, Jim Faris and Darrel Rhea) we would have found it of practical use, not systematically, but in only some areas of the central challenges facing us. Why should that be so? Reflection points to what Richard Buchanan terms "the radical indeterminacy" of the subject matter of design. The Australian taxation system is complex beyond ordinary understanding (constantly generating emergent responses), long-lived (so that the "old" strongly conditions design of the "new"), multi-agent (hence organic and behavioral, not mechanical), highly contingent in its possible designs (allowing competing design visions to thrive), and the product of multiple "designers" (both at any point in time and through time). How then to effect the necessary yet flexible synthesis of design theory, practice and insight to sustain a dynamic design capability tailored to, or designed for, this multi-dimensional domain? |
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Redesign of accountings vision
Vaughan S. Radcliffe The modern accounting profession is in the midst of fundamental redesign, as consultancies and other operations are shed by major firms in the face of regulatory scrutiny, while professional bodies seek to reinvigorate their claim to expertise and centrality in the professional project by promoting themselves as keepers of a carefully designed and articulated vision of what it is to be a financial professional. What is different and intriguing about these developments from past efforts is the level of conscious effort or design that has actually gone into them: accountants as the most formidable players in the world of professional service firms have turned their tools and languages of consultancy on their own operations, with far reaching consequences and rethinking of their activities. Intriguing also is the sense of past and present realities presenting themselves as barriers to this conscious design or imagining of what the profession should be. The SECs concerns to preserve independence, until recently seen as an effort to lock the barn doors after the horses and much else had bolted, was instead conjoined with a rising stock market and pressure to provide ever increasing per partner income. The result, a series of IPOs, divestitures and other efforts to remove the consulting activities from the major firms even as such practice is championed by the AICPA as the future of the profession, has led to an odd disconnect between these projects, suggesting issues of a clashing or melding of designs and their mutual reworking in the field. Speculation that once sold these practices will in essence be rebuilt within the Big Five, perhaps with greater care for independence concerns, underlines this malleability in the face of circumstance. This is important in thinking of a design for management because in the age of shareholder value so much of management has become financial management if not financial engineering, and accountancy firms have been key purveyors of this set of knowledge and practice. Many management problems are met with consulting and other solutions proffered by the Big Five, themselves acting as a kind of clearing house, repository, promoter and toll keeper on modern management programs. So a changing design of the profession has material consequences in the design and designation of contemporary management practice. |
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Designing in the Durée
Julie Rennecker The canvas is never blank. Design, and its influence on the world, always occurs within, and emerges from, the durée, the ongoing flow of activity comprising daily life (Giddens, 1984). Informed by a past only partially of their making and aimed at a future extending beyond their divining, designers design at particular points in time, using the then- available knowledge and resources, and then release the design into the configuration of perspectives and alliances constituting the social landscape, relinquishing control over its interpretation and use. While immersed in the flow, one has little ability to effect its direction or speed, focusing instead on tactical choices to negotiate its varying tempos and demands. In contrast, taking a design approach represents a choice to momentarily suspend ones self above or just outside the flow, making its patterns and governing rules visible. But the durée continues to flow, and, ultimately, the design will be introduced into that flow, the context from which it emerged, its success shaped by its (and the designers) ability to withstand the currents it creates there. In the design studioor conference roomthe novel comes to life, and strategically-placed lights (or strategically-employed rhetoric) illuminate the unique and the fresh, casting shadows that obscure the mundane, the less artful. However, when the design moves from the studio to its location(s) in the world, juxtaposed against other buildings, sculptures, or policies, viewers choose their own viewpoints and position their own lights, forming their own responses to what they see. The designer may then discover that the vantage point that offered fresh perspective may have simultaneously obscured upstream and downstream impacts on and of the design. These impacts, then, become new inputs, and the design continues to evolve and evoke. Designing in the durée implies an appreciation of the simultaneous transience and endurance of our influence, recognizing both the opportunity and the limits of our particular vantage point, embracing the consequences of a design as the raw material for subsequent creations. |
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Designability
Rikard Stankiewicz We wish to be able to design things, but are all things designable? Design is a particular mode of problem solving. Its use differs considerably from one area to another. In technology, for instance, it is possible to distinguish between the predominantly discovery driven fields on the one hand and design driven on the other. It is worth pondering why there are such differences and what do they imply. Designability in a given field is a function of the properties of the underlying knowledge base which defines that fields design space, i.e. a combinatorial space formed by the basic technical capabilities which we call operants. The maturity of the design space can be measured by the degree to which its operants conform to the following requirements: (i) they are characterized by high stability and reliability; (ii) the primitives from which more complex operants are derived are capable of generating a fine-grained, generic design space with a multifunctional domain of applications; (iii) the systems to which they give rise are characterized by transparency, decomposability, and maintainability; (iv) the operants are capable of being described, represented and manipulated symbolically to facilitate the design process and to enable their communication and sharing in a large community of practitioners. And finally, (v) the operants and their relations form a hierarchy of design languages spanning the design space. In those terms the field of social organization and management has been characterized by low maturity and therefore limited designability. This however may now be changing due to the increasing intermingling of social systems with other technologies of which the information technology is by far the most important. The analysis of the emerging hybrid design space should be a major research focus of the management sciences. |
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Design, suffering and learning
Leigh Star Things that are radically new interrupt our experience, in John Dewey's words. They hurt. They force us to drop habits and become new kinds of people. Technology, and design, on this view, is wild. Sometimes it becomes domesticated and sometimes not. At the same time, many discussions of design (particularly in my area, social aspects of information technology) make it sound mild, supportive of the status quo, modelled on work or play as it "really is." What kinds of learning come from confronting the wild parts of design? What of the pain (good pain, bad pain) of incorporating the new? When design melds into infrastructure, does it carry with it the pain (unresolved?) of learning the wild? Is infrastructure then part of our unconscious, the dead weight of unresolved pain -- or the live receptacle and source of the ongoing learning? |
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Aesthetics, tacit knowledge and managing as designing
Antonio Strati There is a question I would like to pose to all of us: How can we design the management of peoples tacit knowledge in their everyday work and organizational practices? Let me give few clues to what I mean with this question. The first concerns the relationships between tacit knowledge and the aesthetic understanding of organizational life. In this frame, aesthetics closely interweave with the tacit knowledge of individuals, and they both signal the entirely personal way in which people act in constructing and reconstructing organizational life through practice, taste and learning. Moreover, still in this frame, rational and analytical approaches to managing as designing are questioned because they tend to prevent organizational scholars from mythical thinking, evocative process of understanding, empathic knowledge, and, generally speaking, prevent scholars from knowledge based on activation of the perceptive faculties - sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch - and on the awareness of aesthetic judgements. On the other hand, while the aesthetic understanding of organizational life prompts considerations which question and undermine exclusive reliance on the rational and mental, it does not seem to provide answers to the above question. Now, should we conclude that art and aesthetics in organizational life serve for criticism and problematizing, while management remains a scientific business that takes little account of organizational participants personal knowledge? And, therefore, that peoples tacit knowledge escapes managing as designing? |
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Managing and designing as everyday practices of ordering
Lucy Suchman Im interested in viewing managing and designing as particular forms of ordering, similarly oriented to the creation of sociomaterial arrangements with, or within which, others can act. This view involves questioning the relationship between ordering taken as the province of those who 'give orders,' and managing, designing and ordering more generally as ubiquitous aspects of everyday life. The particular social histories of management and design as professions are both necessary to an understanding of current conceptions and, I would argue, the greatest limiting factor in thinking through other possibilities. Design and management practice tend to take place in relatively insulated environments, and to privilege the technical knowledge and professional relations of the designer/manager, while relying on imaginary, under-specified conceptions of the user/worker. Recent efforts to develop critical, practice-based forms of participatory or cooperative design are instructive for thinking about managing as well. The following are some provocative questions from the field of design:
A project for our workshop might be to consider how these questions, and the kinds of answers that are beginning to emerge in the realm of design, might map on to the case of management. |
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Metaphors and poetics between architecture and management
Alexander Tzonis Seen from the point of view of management there are many fascinating things about architecture. Starting with Herbert Simon, many people in the management community, have been captivated by the spontaneity and fantasy with which architects appear to conceive their projects. But there are other cognitive characteristics, more profound than the apparent style of thinking with which architects are identified, that make the manner they conceive their projects so seductive. There is something extremely engaging and fundamental about the products of architecture, the buildings, that prompts them to work as robust metaphors to be applied in other domains of practice. One of the reasons for this attraction is the mode buildings are made (constructed, articulated, and demolished), the intimate and vital relation humans have with them (being contained, protected, and imprisoned by them, or possessing them), and the manner they use them (entering, moving through, embedding in them). These characteristic attributes of buildings prompts buildings to be gainfully applied as metaphors, vehicles for communicating, elucidating, and even justifying new complex ideas about successful distribution of power, effective arrangement of control, and efficient structure of information, tasks people in management struggle to satisfy in their projects. In other words management thinking can be aided by spatial-functional thinking especially in the formation of hypotheses for possible solutions to management problems. The spatio-temporal, sensory-motor experience of navigating through and manipulating architectural objects, may be possible to use heuristically at the early stages of an inquiry, the conceptual design stages, to offer by analogy, a fast insight into complex management projects, too hard to capture through known analytical methods. In addition, looking into architecture, not only in terms of its products but also in terms of the processes it mobilizes, one is confronted with powerful, unrivaled, and for many mystifying ways through which architects synthesize, create. I am referring to two major characteristic methods in use that are routinely applied by architects to conceive building as demonstrated in the oeuvre of architects such as Le Corbusier, Gerhy, or Calatrava.: 1. Sketching and 2. Recruiting precedent schemes. What is interesting in architecture in the context of this meeting is not so much the cognitive processes that architects apply, processes that all humans are endowed with the competence to apply. The engaging aspect is how architecture throughout its history as an institution, has recruited such competencies, how it has structured them into employed habits of the mind and methods in use. The inviting aspect is the potential of transposing such methods in other domains such as management, the challenging one how this transference can be done. Some of these ideas have been presented in a series of courses given in the College de France, May 2001, to appear also in Designing, a Cognitive Theory, Cambridge: MIT Press (forthcoming). |
| The role of constraints
Betty Vandenbosch The seed idea I offer to the Workshop on Managing as Designing is and exploration of the role of constraints. Many design disciplines embrace constraints as a key element of their design processes. While architects may work very hard to circumvent local planning laws, they recognize that a key component of their |