China has caught up to the U.S. and Western Europe in great swaths of the economy. Yet China’s schools lag Western counterparts in teaching “design thinking,” or taking the problem-solving process designers use to create products and applying it to the greater tasks of running a business. Many schools still teach design within the framework of fine arts, without a significant nod toward business or other disciplines.
Now the central government is developing a design policy to help China move beyond a manufacturing economy and forward in implementing cross-disciplinary education and bridging left- and right-brained thinking. As in other sectors, schools are beginning to train a new wave of design managers “with Chinese characteristics” who can apply design thinking in a context that fits China’s commercial and political landscape.
“With almost a million students studying design in universities, design education is a national issue,” says Wang Min, dean of the school of design at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. “Most people don’t really know what design can do for them.” Min, who was formerly the design director for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, adds. “In many places, we still need to promote design and design thinking.”
CAFA is overseen by the Ministry of Education, the central government body that regulates state school curriculum. Since 2004, it has offered a Master’s in Design Management and Wang says CAFA is considering forming a partnership with a business school to develop an MBA with a design curriculum. Tsinghua University in Beijing has been working with schools and design organizations around the world to explore innovation, design and management—themes of this year’s Tsinghua International Design Management Symposium.
In south-central China, Hunan University is focusing on research-based design with a focus on human-centered design and design strategy. Also since 2004, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPU) has offered a master’s in design (Design Strategies) that integrates design, business and technology.
Shanghai’s Tongji University, one of China’s top technical schools, tapped experts from schools around the world, including HKPU and IIT, to advise on the launch of the new College of Design & Innovation, which opened in May. The college, which replaces the Art & Design Dept. under the College of Architecture & Urban Planning, hopes to foster innovation in China through design research, design management and education, and will focus on international, interdisciplinary cooperation.
Lorraine Justice, head of HKPU’s design school and member of the advisory group to Tongji’s new college, says the school will offer a research-based program. The university also founded the Tongji-KIC Design Innovation Center in Shanghai to encourage collaboration between industry and academic institutions. “Design education in Tongji is transferring from Bauhaus to D school” and will be more international, inter-disciplinary, and innovative, pledges Lou Yongqi, a professor and deputy head of the new college.
Based on experiences in the developed world, however, the transition might not be quick or easy. Even today in the U.S., “the fact that most design programs are in art schools is problematic,” says John Rousseau, design director at brand design firm Hornall Anderson. Because many schools have focused on the craft of design, with little interaction with business, communications, and computer science, he says, design graduates often are ill-prepared to collaborate with other professionals
As China’s economy continues to shift from its manufacturing roots, experts hope that design can become a respected industry in its own right. In Beijing, the creative industry, which includes disciplines such as art and architecture, tourism, and sports, grew by 18%, to $106 billion in 2007, according to local media reports. Wang says better statistics about the value of the design sector in China are difficult to come by, but he says, “We also need this number to promote the design industry.”
Business is doing its part, too. In 2002, Carnegie Mellon graduate Elaine Ann founded Kaizor Innovation, an innovation consultancy in Hong Kong. Kaizor has worked with the Hong Kong and Huizhou governments and quasi-government entities such as the Hong Kong Design Center, Hong Kong Productivity Council, and Hong Kong Science & Technology Park to teach design thinking and “human-centered design”—a methodology that bases design around the needs and habits of the end user—to business executives and government officials.
Ann has also seen a small number of first-tier, up-and-coming Chinese companies, including Lenovo, Baidu (BIDU), Alibaba, Huawei, Changhong, and BuBuGao, starting to establish user experience design teams, which focus on how people interact with a product or service, and are doing user research overseas. But because designers have varied levels of training and experience and many come from other disciplines, she says, the field is still in its infancy, like the U.S. was 10 to 20 years ago. “Many are stuck at how to convince management to incorporate such methodologies into the entire operation,” she says.
In recent years, Ying Zhang, frog Design’s general manager for Asia, has seen design and education begin to open up to new approaches. Recently, frog Shanghai has received more requests from both large and small Chinese companies for help with product innovation.
Still, Zhang says, most Chinese firms continue to function as design outsourcers, supplementing clients’ teams rather than providing innovative strategy. For now, frog does not face much competition from local companies, but they “are growing fast, so we are always very cautious about things to [maintain] our status,” says Zhang. As exports decrease and labor costs rise, “most companies in China have realized, especially over the past year, that they must begin changing the original manufacture-oriented model to survive.”
Chinese design schools and shops still may be behind, but China has shown, particularly when the central government gets involved, that it can learn quickly.
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Seoul Stakes a Claim on Design
September 30th, 2009 | Posted by innovAs global educators attempt to define the best way to teach the world’s future executives, designers, and innovators, the mayor of Seoul has sponsored an ambitious project to strengthen South Korea’s national design industry.
Design Seoul Headquarters (DSH) was launched in 2007 to make design a central part of future businesses. The 100-person organization is overseen by Kyung-won Chung, the city’s deputy Mayor and Chief Design Officer, who is also a professor in the industrial design department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He says the improvement of design education is critical to his mission, as new graduates provide the foundation on which the city’s future prosperity can be built.
Chung, 59, recently spoke to BusinessWeek’s Venessa Wong about the challenges of building a national design education system. He also explained his “Designomics” strategy for Seoul and South Korea. An edited version of the conversation follows.
How does design education in South Korea stack up against other countries in Asia and the West?
The reality is that many institutions still conduct low-quality, technique-based training in design. These institutions lack unique programs, qualified and experienced faculty, well-equipped facilities, an open educational environment, and flexible budgets. This all contributes to poor design education that does not meet international standards. Students graduating from those institutions experience many difficulties with employment. Also, the number of design majors outnumbers the limited spaces for employment.
How can you change this?
To improve design education, universities need to develop and facilitate unique, specialized curricula. Moreover, they need to recruit educators from advanced design nations. The globalization of design education is a major issue. Those institutions that do not conform to this change will be forced out naturally.
To what extent has industry in Seoul embraced design and design thinking?
Top managers of leading corporations in various industries are striving to use design strategically. Corporations such as Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Hyundai Kia Automotive Group, and Amore Pacific are providing educational programs in design management for top executives. Several professors, including me, along with executives at design companies, are employed as lecturers to teach how to implement design thinking in business.
Kumho Asiana Group [an industrial conglomerate based in Seoul] opened a two-day design management outreach program in 2006 to educate vice-chairmen and top executives on new understandings about design, design management, corporate identity, and personal identity. The outreach program expanded to senior managers in 2007 and to managers in 2008 to improve the standard of customer service through design thinking.
What is the South Korean’s government’s approach to design?
“Designomics” is Seoul’s new catchphrase. It means expanding the economic role of design to cope with the current depression.
And what does Designomics actually entail?
Mayor Oh announced a comprehensive budget plan of about $100 million for the next three years to improve the design capabilities of small to midsize enterprises. The budget will be spent on building various infrastructures to provide design services, from custom-made design information to the re-education of mid-career designers working in companies or design consulting firms. Seoul has also initiated various design projects to help the poor, the disabled, and the elderly in order to narrow down the social gap.
How will the city government get involved?
There will be a low-interest loan program for businesses that produce highly competitive design products with the latest technologies. Also, we are trying to establish a networking system for design consultancies and freelancers who introduce designs with great potential, linking them to corporations with proper production resources. We will implement an incubating system to provide talented young designers with temporary studios and seed money for necessary equipment and operation.
September 30th, 2009 | Posted by innovIt’s a scary time to be a new graduate. But some seem more optimistic than others.
Around the world, graduates are emerging from interdisciplinary master’s programs that integrate design, technology, and business. These professionals are trained in “design thinking.” Sure, it’s the latest trendy term to sweep the business world, but it’s a technique that designers and executives alike hope may help to provide a solution to some of the world’s serious challenges.
The only problem? There’s no consensus on how to teach it. And there’s no agreement on where these thinkers should spring from. Should design schools create more business-focused creatives, or should business schools foster creative thinking in their MBAs? For now, both approaches to innovating education are rolling out, and both types of programs appear on the 2009 BusinessWeek D-school List.
As departments build on their unique strengths to formulate new programs, varied results have emerged. Some programs are co-taught by professors from design, business, and other departments, such as at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). Others, such as a partnership between three schools in Helsinki, bring together students from various universities for cross-disciplinary project work. Another approach: dual degrees in business administration and design, such as the MBA and Master’s in Design program from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Despite the different approaches, the programs have a similar aim: to merge design, business, and technology. Professors urge students to value cross-disciplinary teamwork, to defy inclinations and shatter silos. The theory: Working across functions will offer fresh perspectives on perennial problems and generate more comprehensive and original results. The goal is to combine creative confidence and analytic ability, says David Kelley, founder of Stanford’s d.school and design consultancy IDEO. “The best students are competent in both.”
It’s still early days, and the chasm between business and design yawns. Closer cooperation is necessary. Designers who exhibit business acumen can be involved at a more strategic level within a corporation. Executives who learn to apply design methods such as prototyping or brainstorming have a better shot at building a corporate culture that nurtures innovation—and the business’ bottom line.
According to Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and one of the early supporters of the discipline, “Every corporation needs a design-thinking type.” That includes industries that may seem like unlikely bedfellows for design, such as banks and law firms.
Visa (V) launched the Global Innovation Strategy Group in September 2008 to align corporate strategy with consumer needs. “As great as an MBA is, we were looking for something more,” says Scott Sanchez, senior business leader for the group. Earlier in 2009, Sanchez hired Laura Jones, 27, a recent graduate from Stanford’s d.school program.
And a number of corporations such as Procter & Gamble (PG), Samsung, and Steelcase (SCS) are beginning to integrate design thinking and its proponents across operations.
Harley-Davidson (HOG) has hired graduates from Northwestern University’s joint MBA and Master’s in Engineering Management program into its Leadership Development Program and gradually promoted them to all levels of management—from product development and marketing to finance and global manufacturing strategy, says Matt Levatich, president and chief operating officer.
And yet, as design thinking moves to the front burner as an innovation tool of choice, questions remain about how its theories can slot into the framework of the business world. Jones is quick to detail that not all of her classmates have found jobs that call for design thinking. Not all corporations know what it is or how to apply it. “It is a work in progress,” she says.
Some designers also balk at the concept, seeing it as a dilution of an industry and discipline they themselves have studied so hard and for so long. “If you teach design thinking, you’re teaching talking: how to use words to describe design,” says Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of San Mateo (Calif.)-based design and innovation consultancy Jump Associates. Patnaik says he looks to hire designers and then trains them in business skills as necessary.
Gadi Amit, founder of San Francisco-based NewDealDesign, also has reservations. “Some people think they graduate with industrial design plus capabilities,” he says. Instead, he says, the graduates lack grounding. Nonetheless, Amit acknowledges things may yet evolve. “I am not precluding that maybe there will be a new type of designer, splitting the profession into all sorts of strands and directions, but we are not there yet.”
At this stage, the true impact of design thinking has yet to be seen in industry, as classes are small and graduates are a mere drop in the ocean of global business. But educators, executives, and public officials around the world are investing in the potential of the technique to provide new insight and enhance innovation in a time that desperately needs both. We may not truly appreciate the fruits of these educational experiments for some time, but if effective, these graduates might just redefine the way the world does business.
How We Came Up With Our D-School List
September 30th, 2009 | Posted by innovFor our annual list of educational establishments looking to produce a generation of design-savvy business leaders (and business-savvy design leaders), BusinessWeek asked academics, designers, consultants, and business managers to recommend master’s and MBA programs that combine design thinking and business administration. About 115 schools were suggested by a group of 42 people that includes managers from Microsoft (MSFT), Steelcase (SCS), and Whirlpool (WHR), as well as the leaders of design firms such as Frog Design, Lunar, and Teague.
We gathered information on every recommended program, interviewing administrators, professors, and graduates to come up with a short list. We then tapped our panel for additional insight. Nominations of affiliated programs or schools were automatically discounted.
The final list of 30 schools presents a diverse mix of international master’s and MBA programs that teach both business and design, emphasize design’s strategic role in business, and significantly bridge disciplines such as design, business, and technology.
The education of future innovators and design thinkers is a huge topic, on which there is little consensus. And it should be noted that comparing programs is far from an exact science. We view our list as a starting point for further discussion and analysis.
Panelists
John Barratt, President and CEO, Teague (U.S.)
Sunny Bates, President and CEO, Sunny Bates Associates (U.S.)
Julio Eugenio Bertola, Manager, Industrial Design Center, Electrolux (Brazil)
Ralf Beuker, Professor, Design Management, University of Applied Sciences (Germany)
Ed Boyd, Vice-President, Consumer Experience Design, Dell (U.S.)
Gordon Bruce, Principal, Gordon Bruce Design (U.S.)
Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research (U.S.)
Fred Collopy, Professor and Chair, Information Systems Dept., Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University (U.S.)
Tom Dierking, Design Director, Innovation Capability, Procter & Gamble (U.S.)
John Edson, President, Lunar (U.S.)
Brandon Edwards, Associate Creative Director, Frog Design (China)
Hartmut Esslinger, Founder, Frog Design (U.S.)
Dan Formosa, Founding Member, Smart Design (U.S.)
Emilio Genovesi, Director, Domus Academy (Italy)
Gil Gershoni, Creative Director and Founding Partner, Gershoni (U.S.)
Tony Golsby-Smith, Founder and CEO, Second Road (Australia)
Vijay Govindarajan, Professor, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College (U.S.)
Lee Green, Vice-President, Brand Experience, IBM (U.S.)
Walter Herbst, Clinical Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and Chairman and Founding Partner, Herbst LaZar Bell (U.S.)
Roland Harwood, Director of Open Innovation, NESTA (U.K.)
Krisztina Holly, Vice-Provost and Executive Director, USC Stevens Institute for Innovation (U.S.)
Daniel Joppert, Marketing and New Business, Objeto Brasil (Brazil)
Joice Joppert Leal, Executive Director, Objeto Brasil (Brazil)
Jaewoo Joo, PhD candidate, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (Canada, South Korea)
Lorraine Justice, Director, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (China)
Prasad Kaipa, Executive Director, Center for Leadership, Innovation & Change, Indian School of Business (India)
John Kao, Chairman and CEO, Kao & Co. (U.S.)
David Kelley, Founder, d.school, Stanford University and IDEO (U.S.)
Kun Pyo Lee, Professor and Head, Industrial Design Dept., Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (South Korea)
Nick Leon, Director, Design London, Royal College of Art (U.K.)
Sharon Li, Creative Coordinator, ?What If! (China)
James Ludwig, Vice-President, Global Design, Steelcase (U.S.)
Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (Canada)
Stephen Melamed, Clinical Associate Professor, Industrial Design, School of Art, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Design Principal, Tres Design Group (U.S.)
Ken Musgrave, Head of Industrial Design, Dell (U.S.)
Alexandre Neves, Master Industrial Designer, Electrolux (Brazil)
Henrik Otto, Senior Vice-President, Global Design, Electrolux (Sweden)
Fernando Pruner, Industrial Design Manager for Food Stream Solutions, Food Preparation & Air Treatment, Whirlpool (Brazil)
Nathan Shedroff, Chair, MBA in Design Strategy, California College of the Arts (U.S.)
John Thackara, Director, Doors of Perception (France)
Dominic Twyford, Principal, India Insights (U.K.)
Deborah Weber, Advertising & Promotional Manager, Design Indaba (South Africa)
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