NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Conversation 22
Managing is Designing?
1 GK VanPatter: Welcome, Richard and Fred. I am delighted that we could get together for this conversation. I have been observing your Managing as Designing initiative at Case Western Reserve University Graduate School of Management and find developments fascinating. It makes for a great story from several perspectives. Many of our readers have likely heard about your activities there. For those who might not be aware, can you give us a brief overview of this initiative? How did your journey into design thinking begin? Fred Collopy: Managing as Designing is a research program that aims to answer the questions, how can ideas from design inform and improve management? And, how can designing complement analyzing and deciding as core managerial skills? Dick and I discussed the importance of design in management when we first met in 1988. But we have never had an opportunity to actually do anything about it until Dick’s involvement in this design process that produced this building made it impossible to resist. As that process got under way, Dick’s thinking, and many of our conversations, began to center on design issues. We found ourselves articulating many of the resulting ideas as principles and wondered if they were valid. Things such as “rely upon multiple models” or “don’t fall in love with your first idea”. We wondered more generally what role design thinking should play in management and what great designers could teach great managers. That led to the idea of bringing them together, which we did in June 2002. We invited architects, artists, musicians, choreographers, product and software designers to join managers and management theorists to talk about these things. We decided early on to take a design approach to that meeting. Rather than call for papers, we asked people to produce short, provocative pieces, and to assume the attitude that these were rough drafts that would serve as the basis for conversations. It was a very productive session, and many of the participants expressed appreciation for the unusual opportunity to cross boundaries and think beyond the usual constraints of academic discourse. Richard Boland: The journey began for me during my doctoral studies. My thesis was on the design of computer applications and how the pattern of communication between the system designers and the intended users affected the design of the system. The findings were that different protocols of communicating created different “problem spaces” for the designers, and that it was not so much a question of who had the “best” design, as it was a question of which problem space a designer used to structure their exploration. Questions of communication and design have fascinated me ever since. A key inspiration for both of us is the work of Herbert Simon, and his Sciences of the Artificial, which called for a revision of the curriculum in management schools based on design thinking. More immediately, I chaired the faculty committee that worked with Frank Gehry in the design of the Peter B. Lewis Building for our school and became reenergized about the power of and need for design thinking in management.
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