This journal will share my reflections as I embark on the final module of the Design Management and Cultures (DMC) course that I’ve been helping teach at the London College of Communication: ‘Leadership and Futures’.
Hello World! Introducing this Journal
I’ve started this journal to help me think through my task for these next six weeks. This is twofold:
- Develop a new perspective on the future of leadership in 2020
- Help plan a design management symposium (in late May)
Prelude
At the start of any new project, we face chaos. An unknown land stretches out before us. We feel anxious, nervous; like an imposter. We shouldn’t be here. People are strange, when you’re a stranger…
The first thing to do: start ordering the chaos. To do this, I’ve always lived by the mantra that writing = thinking.
So this journal is a journey from chaos to order.
I’m hoping that it will provide a galvanising narrative that encourages other travellers to follow along.
Why does ‘design management’ matter?
Design management is a new discipline. It’s a story still being written.
Ultimately, it is a new way to get into the managerial class without going to business school.
It sits at the intersection of two mega forces: the realms of art (design) and business (management):
Perhaps, therefore, one of the patron saints could be Andy Warhol. He juxtaposed the forms of both business and art. He famously said:
Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
(Check out the current Andy Warhol show at the Tate Modern)
Therefore, the ‘conceptual domain’ (a term I’ll discuss later) is huge!
On one hand, you have all the stuff people learn in business school: a practical toolkit of process, models etc. And, on the other hand, you have a profound toolkit that is more concerned with pushing the boundaries of representation.
Is this gonna save the world, or make it worse? Or, as Adbusters put it…
What about culture(s) and design management?
Culture(s) haunt design management.
Design thinkers have a different relationship to culture(s) than economic thinkers:
- Business mindset = culture(s) is a source of new markets and a way for managers to control employees
- Design mindset = culture(s) is about care
These are two very different value systems. They have different laws-of-motion. They take you to different places.
What is the design managers view on late/post-capitalism?
Design management emerges from the ‘recession generation’.
This generation witnessed the public shaming of Wall Street in 2008. They saw what happens when individual greed is allowed free rein.
Now, over a decade later, capitalism faces an epochal three-pronged attack.
This is an amalgamation of:
- the social critique of inequality
- the artistic critique of inauthenticity
- the environmental critique of despoliation
The culturally-informed design manager is equipped to manage the complexity of this transformation.
The design manager knows how to share
Godfather of cyberpunk, William Gibson, wrote:
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed
This dude coined the term cyber-space. And he wrote a novel called Pattern Recognition about a female futurist. He’s someone to have on your radar.
So, let’s apply his quote. Try this exercise:
- Imagine society is a living body
- Next, imagine money is the blood that keeps society pumping
- Now, reflect on this insight: ‘the combined wealth of the richest 26 people equals the combined wealth of half the planets population’
- What comes to mind? Vampire, anybody?
Shout out to William Morris: an embodiment of design management
As well as creating absolutely beautiful patterns, William Morris wrote really useful utopias:
You can visit William Morris’s home in Walthamstow- anyone up for a trip when lock-down is over?
How a design manager could think about leadership
William Morris teaches us to be both useful and beautiful. This is echoed by my top writer, E.M Forster, in his novel ‘Howards End’:
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
That novel was written in 1910. Four years later, humans would unleash mechanised brutality upon the world in the WW1.
So, let’s apply this quote. How might we connect:
Management (the prose): marketing, supply chains, big-data, intelligence reports, consumer trends, marketing strategies, whitepapers, conferences, organisational charts, client relationships, board meetings, catch-ups and ‘Friday drinks’
WITH
Design (the passion): scenes, shows, aesthetics, emotions, therapy, manifestos, festivals, galleries, retreats, love and hedonism.
This is urgent. We don’t know what neoliberal logic has in store for humanity
What is the conceptual domain of culture(s)?
Let’s return to culture(s). It’s catnip for design managers. But how to use it? I want to introduce a powerful term: conceptual domain.
To use technical jargon, a conceptual domain is a ‘coherent organisation of human experience’. Alternatively, we could just say that a conceptual domain is a ‘bunch of stuff’.
PRO-TIP: The (dis)Connected Lives project saw everyone create amazing conceptual domains
Culture(s) (when embraced in all its maddening complexity) is a treasure trove of ‘stuff’. And, of course, the culturally-informed design manager has been trusted with a key.
PRO-TIP: Trello is a kickass way to develop a conceptual domain
My cultural canvas (below) is a failed attempt to map a conceptual domain of culture(s). My motivation was a desire to create an alternative to the boring PESTLE model that you might learn in business school.
I guess the main point is that design managers are ninjas that can wield both this canvas AND the PESTLE model.
Where is culture(s) going next?
To give a glimpse into where culture(s) is going next, I’ve started working on a ‘conceptual domain for the critical post-humanities’ model (see below).
What the hell does that mean? I’ll define the three terms:
- Critical: these are the main areas of critique that developed over the late 20th century, things like race, gender, sexuality, class and so on.
- Post-: the term ‘post’ refers to all the crazy new stuff coming out of the humanities departments at the moment. I’ve selected a few of my personal areas of interest
- Humanities: these are the types of things covered by things like philosophy, literature, history, geography and so on (my selection has a literary leaning as that’s my personal cultural identity)
Ok, so what next?
I guess the next question is: how do we set the conceptual domain of design management in motion?
Or, to put it another way: how will the London College of Communication conduct a Design Management Symposium in the age of contagion?
I’ll reflect on this further in my next journal, but for now I’ll share three design principles that will help:
- Explore the affordances of online platforms and become platform ninjas
Over the past week I have used (from the top of my head) Slack, Trello, BBcollaborate, Mural, Gdocs, Zoom, WhatsApp, Prezi, Microsoft Teams and Moodle to communicate and collaborate
2. Start designing a collective now to get hype going
See my ‘Designing an Online Collective’ Trello for inspiration, it explores principles of persuasion, meaning-generation, motivation theory, and the different types of roles
3. Deploy dynamics from ‘game’ and ‘play’, and maybe check out the Situationist movement…
