Los estudios de aves acuáticas en ríos

According to Rodney Fitch “it is probably true that the (Thatcher) government banged the drum for design-led innovation like no other for 100 years”. As a driving force behind the new design management we first have to establish whether all the drum banging through seminars, videos, DTI and Design Council literature did actually wake up industry to the benefits of design.

Research suggests that few firms took any notice of it. According to a 1996 survey of thirty five manufacturing firms by Tom Fisher (1996) at Sheffield Hallam University, only three had made any use of DTI literature in terms of developing procedures to manage New Product Development (NPD). However, this research does indicate that certain elements of ‘good’ management practice in NPD and design management are fairly widespread. The use of cross-functional teams and the adoption of set procedures in NPD can be seen in the majority of companies surveyed. A further part of the survey was to ask designers who worked in such teams whether it enhanced or constrained their creativity. In the majority of cases they considered that it increased their ability to be creative. At first sight then, British companies appear to be marching to the drumbeat of the design management message, wherever they’re hearing it from, and designers are unlocking more of their creative talent. But let us not be too hasty in getting out the bunting and singing a few choruses of ‘design management’s coming home’.

According to Peter Wickens (1995) “more nonsense is written about teamworking than almost any other concept”. In his view cross-functional project teams only work if two other things are in place. The first is a commitment to permanent teamworking that infuses the entire company, and the second is a real commitment to job security. Given the continued tenacity to hierarchies in most organisations, and the continued fashion for corporate downsizing and short-term contracts, the existence of teamworking in a company is in itself fairly meaningless.

The perception by designers that they are more creative may in fact be a consequence of the increasingly stunted cultural ambitions and aspirations of the profession. The term design management contains a fundamental contradiction.

Design is about exploration and risk taking—as such it runs the risk of failure.

Management, on the other hand is about control and predictability. Put the two together and design begins to lose out.

Design management literature has begun to seriously address how CAD can be implemented in such a way to curb creativity. Culverhouse (1995) proposes new practices to reduce design time and thus time-to-market, arguing that “it seems sensible to provide a knowledge constrained framework within which design may progress, given the need for management control of the design process”.

One of the fundamental contradictions of this system is that increasing management control and predictability is at the cost of decreasing design’s potential for innovation—the very reason for investing in it in the first place.

Armstrong and Tomes (1996) have discussed this in terms of the increasing specification of briefs in design management. They conclude that in the process of making design a predictable tool of corporate planning “design will converge on a bland mediocrity and thus, incidentally, fail in the task which it was to accomplish for the corporation—the creation and location of new product markets”.

Bill Hollins (1996) provides another view, consistent with this, that suggests that the very logic of British management based on short-term financial return combined with practices such as business process re-engineering, downsizing and benchmarking lead to product strategies based on small profitable niches rather than large market share and concludes that “many of the management actions and policies are making the organisations inflexible and unable to manage the design of their products and services into the future” (Hollins, 1996).

So, design management contains within it some inherent contradictions arising from the very logic of late capitalism which need to be considered more fully and empirically. As part of this we need to explore and define the diverse forms of design management. During a study to investigate the match between design management practice and design management education a series of interviews were undertaken in the summer of 1997 with individuals whose role included design management. The aim was to establish what their roles were as Design Managers, how they operated in their organisations and what knowledge and skills they required to operate effectively as Design Managers. These individuals worked either in Design Consultancies or as in-house Design Managers in major UK companies. The following case studies represents the findings for four of the interviewees.

Case study No. 1 Alison Fitch, Reebok U.K.

Background

Alison trained as a Fashion and Textile designer with a BA (Hons.) degree from Manchester Metropolitan University, between the years of 1987–1990. As a graduate her first job was with a fashion and textile importer. Although she initially began work here purely as a designer over the four years she was with the company she was promoted to a position where she took on many more responsibilities including design, sourcing and procurement, and manufacturing management roles. Before leaving to join the team at Reebok Alison found herself in sole charge of certain accounts and managing the entire design process from initial concept stages through to manufacture and production. It was during these years that she first learnt about the Fashion Design Industry as a business, she learnt to cope with people—both customers and suppliers, and she learnt about project management.

Alison first began work for Reebok in 1994 where she was appointed as Design Manager. She was in fact the first design manager there, and the role occurred as a result of restructuring. Previously such concerns had been the domain of the Senior Designer and the Product Development Manager, now this work has been divided between the Design Manager and the Sourcing Manager. It is the task of the Sourcing Manager to over see the Production and Manufacture side of the design development; visiting factories currently in operation; establishing possible new sites for production; dealing with the Human Resource problems related to the factories and their staff etc. Whereas the Design Managers concerns are entirely concerned with the design and production of the garments themselves.

Although Alison is constantly liaising with the Senior Brand manager, the decisions remain very much led by the design department, and future directions and briefs are devised by Alison and her team of designers. This is a key role for Alison as Design Manager.

The role and responsibility of the design manager

Alison’s full job description and title is of Apparel, she is in charge of all design work that is carried out in-house in the U.K.Alison defined her role and responsibility as follows:

Human resource management has become a major element of her work—

“Since I started it has changed and a great deal of my job was involved in designing my own ranges whereas as the teams have been built up this has shifted and now I am basically in charge of keeping them motivated and ensuring they are doing what is required of them”.

Skills required

Alison believes that a main reason why she has taken so well to this particular role has been her own family background and instinctive love of being with and working with people. “I was brought up in a pub and learnt to mix with an awful lot of different people from a very early age. This has helped a great deal as you have to deal with so many different types of people in this job”. “Instinctively I love to be with people and as a result I don’t find it a trauma to manage a design team and this is essential. You cannot ever feel insecure. You are handing design responsibility to a team of people and you need to have the confidence in them in order to make it work”.

Design Skills: Within this particular role as Design Manager a background of practical design has proved to be essential—enabling Alison to fully appreciate the task in hand, and to plan accordingly, and also to enable her to design and to step in whenever necessary.

Design Awareness: Ability to visualise how a design on paper will look three dimensionally.

Interest in Design: A keen interest and aim to keep the ranges forever new and different is essential—especially as the very nature and structure of the ranges would make it very easy to lapse into a situation where very little is ever altered.

Design Vision: It is essential to be both creative and practical in the sense that the Design Manager must fit the design ideas into a commercial and realistic context.

Commercial Awareness: It is imperative it is to understand design work within its business and market context.

Personal skills and attributes: Equally as important as academic and practical design skills, initiative and instinctive personal skills also seem to be essential.

Patience: Alison rated this as one of the most essential skills for a Design Manager, as often finds herself incredibly frustrated when trying to get her own ideas and design suggestions recognised by others in the firm.

Persuasion: Ultimately it is Alison’s job to present the design team’s ranges of work to the sales force and this involves constant persuasion both visually and verbally. “The Design Manager needs both vision and persuasion”, in the past the sales division have had a great deal of sway over the designs chosen for production. “Constantly battling to gain respect from a design aspect”… Alison has spent her years at Reebok trying to convince others that design is far more than arts and crafts and very highly directional and persuasive as a “selling tool”.

Confidence: in both yourself and the design team: It is essential to personally believe that the work you are presenting is a good proposition: “There is nothing worse than presenting work that you yourself do not believe in”.

Adaptability: The nature of this job entails a character that “can wear many different ‘hats’”. In addition to this Alison has had to adapt her own skills in line with the company; Reebok have a very strong culture, and Alison has been on a number of courses to develop a Reebok approach to such activities as interviews and presentations.

Polyphasic: An essential skill of design management for Alison is to keep a number of balls in the air at any given time—being able to juggle ideas and worries simultaneously and with relative ease. “You have got to be able to have 20 million things going on in your head at once—you have to be able to juggle”.

Imagination: “Not only in terms of design but also in terms of how to use people to their best advantage”.

What is design management?

For Alison design management involves…“Range building in a commercial market place; building into ranges; the correct and most appropriate use of colour and interesting fabric; creating the right silhouettes; devising price pointers;

creating a range that is commercial enough to appeal to a wide range of customers.

The Design Manager is employed in order to ensure that each range incorporates each of these elements regardless of who actually designed it.”

Case study No. 2 Karin Ward, Prudential

Background

Having studied both ‘O’ Levels and ‘A’ Levels Karin received direct entry into a degree in Graphic Design. As a graduate Karin’s first job was working for Waltham Forest as their in-house designer; this role taught her to be very independent as she was very much working alone and with all design elements.

Having decided she needed commercial experience of her own Karin set up in her own business with a college friend. On leaving this business Karin went to work for MGM Cinemas as a Graphic Designer for their video literature and again was very much in sole charge—“There were ten people in the states doing what I alone was doing”. From this job she then joined ‘Crown House plc.’ where she implemented a new corporate identity. After one year working there she joined the in house design team at the Stock Exchange until finally joining Prudential in 1989. Completing her transition from designer to manager of design.

When Karin first joined Prudential she worked within a separate design division. She headed this team, turning them into a unit that could service the company professionally, mainly working towards producing the marketing literature in response to the various divisions requirements…“Competing against all other design agencies and fighting against the prejudice that out-house was better than in house”.

After a period of intensive restructuring in the company as a whole, the decision was made to out-source all design work, the design team therefore disbanded and Karin took on the role as Head of Design—a post she has now held for over a year.

Since January of 1996 the company has centralised into what is known as Prudential U.K. Since this time Prudential have created a bank and for various legal reasons this needs to be a separate operating arm. It is the Strategic Team which oversees the work of each of these ‘arms’, and this is where Karin’s role as Design Manager sits. Much of her responsibility lies in the look of Prudential Assurance and the Bank.

The role of Design Manager

Karin’s role entails a number of diverse, yet closely linked activities:

Skills required

Design Awareness: “I do not necessarily think that you need to be a designer but you do need to have an appreciation. I think more than anything else it is communication and understanding what the company is trying to do with its literature and to ensure that it does that to the best of its ability”.

Management skills: “An ability to instigate and manage process in a sympathetic way”.

Persuasion: “Working within large organisations and working with people generally who do not have a real understanding of design and who actually see it as that unnecessary bit of frippery—you need to be able to help them to understand the value of it.”

People management: “It is about handling people and delivering the message in a way that people do not feel threatened or patronised”…“A relationship with people is very important and an appreciation of where they are coming from; the skills are working with the major stake holders and the ability to bring them all together”.

Interpersonal skills: “Possibly one of the most necessary elements of the job and this is where I feel designers often fall down. Some good designers find it hard to talk to those who do not understand what it is that they are trying to say—they get both frustrated and irritated and this comes across”.

Patience: “Because it is a very frustrating job…certainly in my experience. Mainly because my role has not been in place before and there is an awful lot of resistance to ‘another process’. The only way you can prove to them is to do it and this takes patience as the results are not immediate”.

Flexible yet prepared to be firm: “Must be able to give when it is appropriate to give and be hard line when you need to be hard line, it is being able to identify where you need to put your foot down and where you need to stand back”.

An eye for design: “I have an assistant working for me who is not a designer but she has a very good eye for design, so I can see how an individual can do the job without being a designer…although she does not possess practical design skills she has a very good eye for design and an appreciation of the process and an understanding of where creativity starts and stops and where pragmatism and logic comes in”.

Natural Ability: “There are elements of natural ability which are essential and you cannot create—and these would be an eye for creativity and an eye for design; if you haven’t got that, any amount of understanding processes and all that sort of thing is just not going to get anywhere”…“Clearly, when interviewing—you need to see something that gives you that comfort factor that they have an eye for design”.

Definition of Design Management: “For me design is communication and as Design Manager you are the custodian of the visual communication to the customer”..“Basically you are responsible for maintaining the consistency of the communication output to the customer”…“It is not just paper based—it is the entire question of how we communicate to our customer”.

Case study No 3 Clare Newton, The Chase

Background

Clare began work as a Design Manager for ‘The Chase’ in 1996 and she is one of four Design Managers within the Consultancy, having originally studied for a degree in Design and Technology which involved a quite practical approach to design—focusing upon graphic and furniture design; with additional elements such as Silversmithing.

As a graduate she began work in a very small publishing company as a Mac operator and typesetter. Although she was involved in page layout it was “very crafted typesetting, rather than graphic design”. Within this same company she was promoted to the role of Studio Manager where her role lay in over seeing the work on the printing press, along with the activities of the designers. She was responsible for the work of four designers, two of which were juniors, and a copywriter—making sure schedules were devised, work was completed on time and to a high standard.

From this role she then joined a company called ‘ADS’ in Piccadilly which specialised in Telemarketing but which had an art work division. Clare worked as

‘Account Handler’ although she relied on her own skills as this post was the first of

its kind within the company. A far more sound grounding in this role was gained when she began work at U.A. Simmons—an Advertising agency, also in Manchester. Working within a far more structured design studio she was taught a number of skills from handling clients effectively to general administration and paperwork skills. Clare then moved to ‘The Chase’ as Design Manager.

A total of twenty seven people work at ‘The Chase’ and these people are divided into three teams each comprised of one or two Senior Designers, a Creative Director, Junior Designers, a Team Leader and a Design Manager (of which there are four in total).

The teams themselves are client based and work with specific clients; Alison’s team being primarily responsible for the Co-op bank, along with a few very much smaller clients.

The role and responsibility of the Design Manager

The role and responsibility of the Design Manager