June 19, 2006, 4:30 pm
DesignBusinessArchitectural Thinking
by Mac McBurney
Filed under: Business, Information Design
This recent Business Week article calls Patrick Whitney, director of the Institute of Design (ID) at IIT in Chicago, a design visionary.
Traditionally, design education is based on visual expression, and students learn through drawing, model making, and studying the work of other designers. That is still the case in most design schools. Little emphasis is placed on how design fits into a business context.
Whitney pioneered a completely different model. The ID curriculum focuses directly on design strategy and innovation. Some 80% of the school’s courses don’t involve making things. User Observation & Early Prototyping aims at understanding consumers’ wants, the crux of the innovation gap. In New Product Development, students also learn how to read a balance sheet. In Design Languages, they learn how to make effective business presentations. In Systems Design, students look at designing business organizations…“Most designers don’t understand business,” says John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. “Patrick has done more than anyone in crossing this chasm.”
ID graduates and faculty made a strong impression on me at ID’s Chicago neighbor Doblin (www.doblin.com). On ethnographic research and innovation projects, designers combined forces with (for example) anthopologists from the University of Chicago and MBAs from Kellogg. Now, in addition to educating innovation-savvy designers, ID now offers a dual Master’s degree with IIT’s business school. From ID’s web site:
The first program of its kind in the world, IIT’s MDes/MBA marks an important milestone in the co-evolution of design, management, and innovation. As design becomes regarded more and more as an essential business resource, professional education that links the two fields is becoming increasingly important.
Could a triple-Master’s degree, adding anthropology or social psychology, be next? Whether companies acquire these skill sets by forming interdisciplinary teams, or by hiring a single cross-trained individual, more companies seem to be waking up to the benefits.
Unfortunately, Business Week applies a caricature of business schools to over-hype an already important point.
Corporations have traditionally mined the best B-Schools for by-the-numbers managerial talent. But who really wants to hire people with masters degrees in “administration” when today’s business culture demands managers who can master the process of innovation.
Historically, b-schools may come by their stereotype honestly, but equating today’s top MBA programs with a 1950s-style “degree in ‘administration’” isn’t fair. More importantly, it’s unnecessary. Programs like the one at ID are newsworthy and valuable even by today’s standards.
For their part, many business schools are offering courses on innovation and contextual research methods along side the finance and economics. What ID would call design thinking, Toronto’s Rotman School of Management calls “integrative thinking.” This is more than another business buzzword: Rotman’s integrative thinking pages contain seminar notes, videotaped speeches by Malcolm Gladwell and Jack Welch, as well as a coherent, detailed explanation of the term. See also: ID’s collection of research and ideas.
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