Bridging Designers and Managers

As a group, designers possess a powerful set of talents, beliefs and aptitudes that are often lacking in today’s average corporate culture, but that is uniquely suited to effecting change for more responsible, humane, and sustainable business practices.

Designers are innovators, problem solvers, and implementors. They are empathetic, focused, and keen observers of environment, and they put challenges and assignments into a context that allows for effective, appropriate holistic solutions. However, they typically eschew corporate politics, bureaucracy, and territoriality.

Following are few insights to bridge the gap between designer and management executives.

• A designer applies knowledge about physical, cognitive, social, and cultural human factors to communication planning and the creation of an appropriate form that interprets, informs, instructs or persuades.
• Designers successfully aspired for open-office architecture—and the accompanying collaborative ethic it encourages. The key to this is establishing clear positive open communications , and then maintaining full mutual understanding at all times, irrespective of how much freedom is delegated.
• To work with other organizations (competitor’s) to share effective proofing and regulatory compliance practices—an important process that benefited consumers.
• Designers empowered to shape the focus of major strategic initiatives, as needed to uphold sustainable and socially responsible standards.
• Designers shall be capable enough to lead the major product development team as product directors.
• A designer aspires to ensure the highest level of strategic design, ensuring a higher return on investment and shall demonstrate the integrity and honor.
• Need a paradigm shift in the Role of Designers in Strategic management.
• The principles and practices of design are often unfamiliar to managers trained or experienced in other domains. Incorporate design thinking to managers. Design thinking is the way designers think, the mind processes they use to design objects, services, or systems, as distinct from the result of elegant and useful products.
• Design thinking results from the nature of design work, a project based workflow around wicked problems.

Feature	Managers	Designers
Flow of work	Mostly Ongoing tasksPermanent assignments	ProjectsDefined terms
Style of Work	Defined roles,Wait until it is right	Collaborative, Iterative
Mode of Thinking	Deductive, Inductive	Deductive,Inductive,Abductive
Status of source	massive budgets, large staff	Solve wicked problems
Attitude	Limited by budgets, constraints are unwanted.	can do attitude
Constraints	Constraints are  hindrances	Constraints are challenges

In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational networks structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social, behavioral, and political issues. As a result, designers have transformed into applied behavioral scientists, but their capability on social and behavior discipline has to be more intense. Design schools do not focus on complex issues interlocking complexities of human and social behavior and about the behavioral sciences. Many designers are ignorant of the complexity of social and organizational problems.

• Designers often have  inadequate knowledge in social and behavioral sciences.
• In addition, designers are often ignorant of the biases that can be introduced into experimental designs and the dangers of in-appropriate generalization.
• Designers are practitioners, which mean they are not trying to extend the knowledge base of science but instead, to apply the knowledge.
• Design forms part of Architecture / Design / Anthropology (A/D/A) paradigm,where as management forms part of Mathematics / Economics / Psychology (M/E/P) management paradigm.
• Design education has to be enhanced in the schools of management education.
• Vital need exists is for new kind of designers T shaped individuals,  who can work across disciplines, who understand society, business, and technology and the appropriate means of validation. Service design, interaction design, and experience design require knowledge of the social sciences, stories, back-stage operations, and interactions.