« Short takes - 9-29-06 | Main | Immigration and competitiveness II »
October 2, 2006
Top Design Schools
Check out Business Week's new special report on The Best Design Schools.
This report highlights a number of things we have been talking about. First, that design is becoming the core of innovation and management thinking. This isn't the old "let's make it look cool" school of design. Design is becoming applied problem-solving -- "let's help the customer solve their problem." Note that I said "help the customer solve" -- not "solve the customer's problem." Key is the interactive nature of the process. This is not top-down imposition of a solution/technology/design. It is participatory problem solving - along the lines of the "customer innovation" process (see A Toolkit for Customer Innovation — HBS Working Knowledge.)
A story in the special report - The Talent Hunt - illustrates the concept. When Mozilla went looking for business development help, they when to Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design rather than the business school:
It made a big difference. A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them. Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers. B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.
Second, design thinking is international. Included among the top schools are not only US and Canadian powerhouses and creative new programs, but European and Asian schools. These include school in China, India and South Korea as well Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan. Anyone who thinks that design is a built-in American competitive advantage hasn't been paying attention. In fact, as the story Designed in China points out:
With more than 400 design programs in Chinese schools, Asian design education is undergoing its own revolution.
According to the story, America is still ahead, for now:
The best Asian schools provide students with first-rate technical skills, but their graduates leave without the ability to work across disciplines or to use design strategically. They're not about to do much business model innovation, for example. Much of this may be attributed to Asian education systems from primary school on, which still tend to stress repetition over independent thinking. Says Justice: "The U.S. has a quick advantage. We grow up asking questions. This carries over into our advanced education. They don't have that in China, and it will take them years to develop that mindset."
Nevertheless, that U.S. advantage won't last long. Already schools in China, Korea, Japan, and even India are pulling together design concepts in new ways to land spots on our Global BusinessWeek Design Schools list. As the Asian schools' competencies grow, a few U.S. design schools are partnering with them. At Oakland (Calif.)-based California College of the Arts, Yves Béhar, founder of fuseproject, recently launched a partnership with Korean cell-phone manufacturer Pantech that brought 20 Korean design students to the U.S. for a brainstorming workshop over the summer. CCA students then returned the visit to present prototypes for the new phones on which they'd collaborated. Pasadena (Calif.)-based Art Center College of Design has partnerships with Tama Art University in Tokyo as well as INSEAD in Singapore. Smart U.S. schools will follow suit.
So, while Washington is trying to cope with the issue of math and science (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics - STEM) education based in part on the concern over the flood of new Chinese engineers, where is the concern over the estimated 10,000 Chinese designers graduating every year? We need to start paying attention to, and supporting, design thinking as well as STEM.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at October 2, 2006 9:22 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.athenaalliance.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/919