Design Management in India

Design management in India is considered more of a management issue rather than a creative issue where as I see it as an intense creative exercise where we study deeply the processes, ideation techniques and research methods used by designers to develop futuristic products and understand them and use them to innovate business processes, develop future strategies and understand latent needs of consumers.


A design manager just does not need to know how to manage  a creative team or understand design but he/she must have an in depth and comprehensive understanding of the interplay between
1 Cultural dynamics
2 Changing life styles
3 Trends
4 Evolving future scenarios .
5 Corporate strategy


Thus this makes design management a very complex field as he / she should be able to forecast and be one step ahead of the world around him/her and yet be able to talk of future in direct context of present.


But as of now, design management is most misunderstood expert area by the corporate India, they are primarily used as brand managers not as innovation managers where as we can see them contributing a lot in the field of innovation and future scenarios.....


What we fail to understand is that at the core of design management lies design thinking which is an approach to innovation, it is a framework for understanding what design thinking is and how to apply it to  initiatives which will benefit businesses. It is a process to understand Innovation as a growth strategy, to facilitate strategic conversations and build an alignment within the organisation to define innovation as an important tool of growth.


What we miss out in the whole process is that the under current of design management is basically Using cultural trends as a framework for generating and designing new offerings, systems and processes. It is to leverage the cultural meaning of visual design and making segmentation useful and bringing customer's latent need to life. It is basically value creation by uncovering what is most meaningful and most valuable to customers.


"Knowledge is the key to opening the doors of innovation and is directly linked to the quality of our sources and intellectual training that we put ourselves through. If we seek radically different ideas, our perspective needs to be radically different. Richard Feynman used to imagine that he was a Martian, and ask, "What would they think if they found such a problem?"


And an in depth understanding of design management helps us develop those perspectives....


My point is that in Indian essence of design management, this is all missing. Design managers are basically client servicing guys for creative or design studios or they are project managers from the management side.
Organisations have to still use them to their best capabilities and not under utilise them.