![I do most of my reading these days online, where it’s easy to forget the pleasures of the long form. This address, delivered to designers in Toronto, is worth the time: The 7 Biggest Challenges in Merging Design and Business | Co.Design
If you’re pressed for time, here are a few bits I liked:
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.
[…]
I recently read a really great interview by Cult of Mac editor and publisher Leander Kahney with former Apple chief, John Sculley, the man who infamously canned Steve Jobs. After detailing how he’d initially bonded with Jobs over matters of industrial design, he told a more recent story of a friend who’d visited both Apple and Microsoft on the same day. At the Apple meeting, Sculley recounted, “As soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking, because the designers are the most respected people in the organization.” He then contrasted this with the Microsoft meeting, where “everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
[…]
Designers can be dictatorial, inflexible, snobby and they often don’t play nicely with others. And for all that this might appear to many designers as being exactly the right state of being, it’s actually unhelpful in the longer term. As Canadian designer Mark Busse wrote recently in an article for Applied Arts magazine, “the immaturity with which we’re viewed will never go away if all we do is whine about everything among ourselves.”
[…]
Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton talks of the need to create I-shaped thinkers (for the typographers in the audience, that’s an “I” with a serif.) This updates Bill Moggridge’s theory of T-shaped thinkers, and provides a vision of designers who can exist in the starry realm of big ideas and keep their feet grounded in the reality and muck of commercial pressures—while simultaneously spanning every moment in between. It’s a delightful idea, but for the time being, only a small number of such deliberately trained hybrid thinkers even exist, and genuine cross-disciplinary collaboration is the exception rather than the rule.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lci620MJKq1qao4iso1_500.jpg)
I do most of my reading these days online, where it’s easy to forget the pleasures of the long form. This address, delivered to designers in Toronto, is worth the time: The 7 Biggest Challenges in Merging Design and Business | Co.Design
If you’re pressed for time, here are a few bits I liked:
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.
[…]
I recently read a really great interview by Cult of Mac editor and publisher Leander Kahney with former Apple chief, John Sculley, the man who infamously canned Steve Jobs. After detailing how he’d initially bonded with Jobs over matters of industrial design, he told a more recent story of a friend who’d visited both Apple and Microsoft on the same day. At the Apple meeting, Sculley recounted, “As soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking, because the designers are the most respected people in the organization.” He then contrasted this with the Microsoft meeting, where “everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
[…]
Designers can be dictatorial, inflexible, snobby and they often don’t play nicely with others. And for all that this might appear to many designers as being exactly the right state of being, it’s actually unhelpful in the longer term. As Canadian designer Mark Busse wrote recently in an article for Applied Arts magazine, “the immaturity with which we’re viewed will never go away if all we do is whine about everything among ourselves.”
[…]
Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton talks of the need to create I-shaped thinkers (for the typographers in the audience, that’s an “I” with a serif.) This updates Bill Moggridge’s theory of T-shaped thinkers, and provides a vision of designers who can exist in the starry realm of big ideas and keep their feet grounded in the reality and muck of commercial pressures—while simultaneously spanning every moment in between. It’s a delightful idea, but for the time being, only a small number of such deliberately trained hybrid thinkers even exist, and genuine cross-disciplinary collaboration is the exception rather than the rule.
