Thoughts on Design as a Strategic Art for Organizations

This chapter addresses an increasingly important issue in designing business: the differences between employing design as a technique, as a method or as a strategic art within businesses and organizations. Design contributes to businesses, organizations, and society as a whole in all three forms, although not necessarily in the same way or for the same purpose. What is striking, then, is the difficulty managers, professionals, and designers have when talking about when and why they are employing design as a technique, when they are turning to design as a method, or when and how design serves them as an art. This inability to communicate is important. It means that we rarely employ design in all its guises because we talk about methods when we mean techniques and we struggle to communicate about design beyond techniques and methods, which is particularly crucial in the context of designing business as an art....