In his movie Reprise, Norwegian director Joachim Trier tells the story of two young men, Eric and Philip, who are budding authors. At one point in the movie, when Philip visits a publishing house to talk about publication of his first book, the editor tells him, “Your first book sets the tone for your entire authorship.”
After two decades of teaching in three continents and a passion in creating impact by design, I assume it’s no coincidence that my first book came out as a design leadership book, and in a textbook format for SRH Fernhochschule – The Mobile University in Germany, both in English and soon in German.
Jurgen Faust, the director of the world’s first online design management program and an unorthodox academic, invited me to write the book on design leadership along with key names in Europe, including design management diva Brigitte Borja de Mozota. What an honor! I can’t thank Jurgen enough for the opportunity.
After a few months of hard work, “Design leadership: Past, Present, and Future” is out. Reviewing the milestones of design leadership discourse gave me a greater vision of how I can contribute to the space in the best way and also share this knowledge for other design leaders in the coming years.
I would like to share these important pillars with you.
*Although it is hardly known outside the academic world, the article ‘Design and Business: Who calls the shots?’ by Raymond Turner, the Group Design Director of BAA, published in 2000 is an important document towards understanding the journey of design in the context of business. In his work, Turner recommends that in the relationship between business and design, business must always be the leader and design should adopt the role of the supportive follower. This approach was supported later by John Meada in his Fast Company interview in a different context in 2019.
*Raymond Turner and Alan Topalian, later in their work in 2002, clearly defined the differentiation between design management and design leadership, which is still not widely known in the design world. They state: “Without design leadership, you don’t know where you are going; without design management, you don’t know how you are to get there.”
*In 2003, Danish Design Center introduced the Danish Design Ladder, a tool for assessing and rating their design maturity, which has been quite instrumental in the positioning of design in organizations since then.
*The Design Council’s “The value of design factfinder report” (2007) is a historical study that connected design with financial outcomes and, more importantly, positioned it as a strong instrument in a country’s economy.
*Design Management Institute’s work between 2013 and 2015, Design Value Index, brought design work in a corporate context to show how design-centered corporations outperform S&P companies by 218%. This was a killer study that paved the way for many design-consultancies.
*Works of major design consultancy companies like IDEO, Frog and Fjord starting from the 2000s made a substantial impact on the business world and turned design thinking into a new business trend. The approval of the key business outlets, such as Harvard Business Review (HBR) and Bloomberg, followed the impact created by these companies.
*McKinsey’s “The business value of design” (2018) is the main milestone where the connection between design and the financial outcome is presented in a wider business context. The HBR Design Thinking (2015) cover also had a strong impact on booming the design business market share along with McKinsey’s 2018 report.
*In the same years, John Maeda’s Design in Tech report also brought a new context to design discussions and became a yearly summary of progress. Besides his Design in Tech reports, Maeda as a design leader himself, brought a new level to the visibility of design leaders as he became a design celebrity after being featured on the cover of Forbes Japan and being mentioned along with Warren Buffett by Wired magazine.
Then in the past two to three years, we started seeing a new wave in design leadership literature:
*Eric Quint, Gerda Gemser and Giulia Calabretta published their book “Design Leadership Ignited” in February of 2022. It certainly made a new mark by reigniting the discussion on how to handle design in daily challenges of corporate reality with solid frameworks and strategies. Three aspects in the book stand out. In the chapter Managing Dualities, the authors guide us on how to handle the dualities of the corporate world and all the conflicts that we face in practice. Another important contribution is “qualitative scaling,” which represents the shifting of the design value from tactical to strategic in a company. Since scaling is highly associated with quantitative contexts, qualitative scaling and the required strategies are quite a mind-opening contribution to the space. Last but not least, their approach to design leadership focuses on collaboration rather than competition with business leaders.
*McKinsey also recently published a report called “Redesigning the design departments,” which also addresses similar challenges that Quint, Gemser and Calabretta do. The McKinsey Design team again did an amazing work by bringing a benchmark of different design organization models, talents, tools and infrastructure. It should be highlighted that McKinsey is the only group who mentioned the importance of tools and infrastructure.
2022 was full of a few more valuable works published after I submitted my book. Kevin Bethune’s “Reimagining Design,” the Design Council’s new “Design Economy Report,” and “Expand: Stretching the Future By Design” by Christian Bason of Danish Design Center. They are all immensely valuable works to be investigated and will be included in the next version of the book.
Most of the work done in this domain comes from the practice itself and the design leaders operating in the corporate world. However, as in many things, to see future directions we need to look at the peripheral communities and maybe the start-up world in this context.
It wouldn’t be too farfetched to say that developments such as tools, methodologies and approaches used for design in web technologies shape the rest of the business world. If we look at Ondeck, Y combinator and Upwork communities, design understanding and its practice are quite different from what we see in the literature or the corporate world. There is no doubt that the start-up world, with its high failure rates, cannot shape the design context in general. However, we cannot ignore it either as some of these companies eventually become the new corporations.
There are four dimensions that might be critical in the coming years from the perspective of the start-up world.
1- Tools, Infrastructures and Systems: Tools, infrastructures and systems (such as Design Systems and DesignOps) are as critical as the designers’ skill set themselves. Although so many people may object to it, this is a huge fact in the start-up world and soon to be the fact of the remote corporate world. Except for McKinsey, the literature largely overlooks this super critical factor, even the ones who focus on scaling design work. What new tools and systems are needed and how can designers be educated about that? Are there any design skills that will be obsolete?
2- The rise of Web3.0: Web1.0 and Web2.0 technologies brought strong practices and new definitions to the design world. Rise of UX, and digital design are just two simple examples. In contrast, Web3.0 proposes a fundamental change by shifting the center of power from companies and brands to the users. Therefore, design positioning will also be substantially changed. What is this new positioning? Which tools, strategies and skills are we to use as the designers to approach the new paradigm? Can blockchain technologies be used to create new ownership for designers in the value chain?
3- Fundamental Shifts in Governance: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) are born with Web3.0 technologies. The management, leadership, and decision-making mechanisms are fundamentally changed. Leadership literature may become obsolete in some cases whereas empathy, empowering, equal ownership, a sense of community, and transparency may form a new leadership style where designers can easily fit in due to its similar context with design. Therefore, can designers be the next ideal candidates for the leadership of this new generation of organizations?
4- Global Grand Challenges: Climate change, energy crises, and other future catastrophes such as another pandemic are the global grand challenges that we are facing in our daily lives today. Resilience against these adversities will also have an impact on what we understand about design and design leadership. What is the role of the design leaders to address the global grand challenges?
My contribution to the design leadership journey in the coming years will be threefold: I will be updating my design leadership book every two years to keep track of the ecosystem. I plan to advance my practice in a mix of Web3.0, blockchain, metaverse and gaming spaces, depending on the opportunities. I have recently completed two Web3.0 and blockchain cases with their unique design arguments (pantherprotocol.io and purplecreator.com, soon to be relaunched) and also used the argument in a greater context recently in Denmark with Futurebox deep-tech startups of DTU Science Park and plan to extend it for more cases in the coming years.
Last but not least, I am missing the Asian angel and experiences in my work. Most of the work I listed here is from Europe and North America. That’s an important angle I would like to acquire sometime soon and share it through the book as well.
Being part of the exciting journey of design could be a tremendous opportunity in the coming years. I hope the people who read ‘Design leadership: Past, Present, and Future’ or this piece will share this excitement.
If we go back to Joachim Trier’s quote from Reprise, “Your first book sets the tone for your entire authorship.” With that in mind, I will do my best to evolve my writing and authorship into stories and even a screenplay at one stage. Until then, let’s meet in the design and business contexts.
Istanbul, 2022