Design Management: Managing Design Strategy, Process, and Implementation

Written by Kathryn Best
Published by AVA Book, United Kingdom
ISBN 2-940373-12-4 and 978-2-940373-12-3
Year published: 2006

The book featured 18 views by 18 professionals from around the world. I contributed a statement about design management from a graphic designer’s point of view. I wrote the following statement (page 198).

My View on Design Management

Inyoung (Albert) Choi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Brand Design
Hanyang University, Korea

Design can express the brand and impress the consumers. Today’s consumers are becoming ‘Active’ and less ‘Passive.’ To express a brand to active consumers, more than ever, designers must act as a brand strategist who must consider how to deliver consistent design solutions that impress the consumers with their actual physical form. Hence, I see no boundaries between designers and design managers. In a competitive market, designers must have the knowledge to fortify the design solution, to compete in the battle of recognition. Design Managers must understand good design and be able to incorporate an appropriate design for each branding or marketing strategy.

If the designs in the twentieth century are based on artistic intuition, because there were a less competitive market and a more unbalanced world economy, then the designs of the twenty-first century are based on both artistic and analytical logic, because the market is very competitive, and the world economy is more evenly spread throughout the world. Therefore, I believe today’s designers should have the following qualities:

• Able to include empathy for the consumers and culture
• Able to distinguish design styles and cultures
• Able to manage design solutions that are sustainable or ephemeral
• Able to formulate a relationship between verbal and visual communication
• Able to write and represent strategic plans and contents
• Able to transcend a marketing strategy to design applications
• Able to manage time and duties

With these qualities, designers and design managers work together as a team to create, manipulate, maintain, constrain, and express strategic design solutions for highly complex consumers.