Designers need business education!
I recently came across an article written by Helen Walters. We appear to reach a similar conclusion about design education. I introduce her opinion.
At BusinessWeek, we worked to put together a list of the schools that teach design thinking… For now, different experiments are being tried in schools around the world… It’s early days, but clearly it’s smart to teach design principles to MBAs.
Reverse attempts at introducing business principles to design folks seem to be less consistent and perhaps more problematic…
Too often it seems that design graduates emerge from school without the skills necessary to thrive in the real world. That strikes me as a tremendous problem. These graduates need to be able to do well beyond the confines of an academic or even a corporate design department. What’s needed is for a legion of smart, informed designers to emerge who can take on the MBAs at their own game… and win. That certainly won’t happen through wishful thinking or by chance…
… If designers want to be seen as more than stylists, and that’s still a common complaint even now in 2010, then they need to step up to drive the projects, not merely be co-opted to make them look good. It seems unfair, in a way, because making things look good, in print, in product or on screen, is no small matter, as I know from my own disastrous, aborted forays into the dark hinterland of PowerPoint. But many people in many disciplines have been forced to expand their skillsets in order to offer much more than they’d initially anticipated. That is the reality of our modern world. And so, as designers continue to be forced to cede control of many of the means of creation they used to be in sole charge of, as they are forced to share their toys and play nicely with others, this is no time for nostalgia or regret. It’s time to reevaluate what else they too can bring to the table.
If you are interested, you can read her article, the 7 biggest challenges in merging design and business.
Pingback: 2010 in review « DesignMarketingLab