Comments on: Designing Design Teams

By: Tom Key

Tom Key — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:14:48 +0000

Hi Jamin,
Can I encourage your thinking by saying that it [creating design teams within organizations as our main mission] is not just “an academic exercise”. This is what 2nd Road does, and there are many stories we can tell you from the front line. We combine basic design training with a ‘do and learn’ approach on real organizational projects. In summary – the people love it, the management push against it. It’s where the rivers of Design and Culture hit head on – the rapids are rough but exciting…

By: Jamin

Jamin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:48:05 +0000

Great point. I agree, design firms already act as mentors or management consultants. I did this myself when working with my clients before graduate school. Education was a big component of what I provided. And I know many other smaller design firms that establish this kind of relationship with their clients. Still, many others do not handle education so well, or don’t even try.

But to clarify, what we were discussing was creating design teams within organizations as our main mission. We would not just educate or mentor clients as we worked with them to design a traditional product or service. Our service would be to help put together an internal design team that would sustain itself. We would then mentor that design team. However, they would be the ones providing design services to the organization.

As a possible strategy to transition to this from design traditional products and services, we considered allowing people to work on one of our teams for a project not related or in association with their company. So it would start off, perhaps, as education by doing alongside us. Then, as that program became a success, we might be able to transition to creating design teams within organizations instead of having individuals come to us.

This is all an academic exercise. But I still thought the idea was intriguing.

By: Peter Jones

Peter Jones — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:56:09 +0000

Many designers do this already – I consider it part of the job of consulting. Perhaps because I view design consulting more like management consulting than “design delivery,” I stay very close to my long term clients. I’ve done this since 2001 as a small research/design consulting firm, and have noticed that smaller consulting firms have always done this. Its the larger firms like IDEO that have to formalize a process for customer intimacy – but when you’re already close to your client, you nurture them in many ways outside of the contractual relationship.

A problem with larger design agencies is they cannot afford to seat their better designers or advisors with clients in a mentoring capacity, and their rate structure won’t easily allow them to give up the time. If we all did a better job of educating the client while working on projects, this would not seem a novel idea but par for the course. We also need to realize that better transition planning (the deliverables handoff from design to development) will reduce the need for mitigating turmoil in the client’s implementation of our design plans.