Welcome note

Welcome to the report of the Design Council / HEFCE fact finding visit to the US. As part of the process to develop and implement recommendations from the 'Cox Review of Creativity in Business' in the UK, a group of academics, officials and policy makers visited universities and design firms in California, Chicago and Boston. We were looking at multidisciplinary centres and courses that combine management, technology and design in order to develop creative and innovative graduates and businesses. Insights and information from the visit will inform proposals that UK universities and regional bodies are developing in response to the Cox review.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Background reading - on the barriers between design and engineering

An interesting article I picked up a few months ago and thought might be relevant...

BOUNDARIES IN OUR THINKING
By Eur Ing Colin Ledsome

Abstract: Boundaries in expertise may be natural borders between clearly different activities, but expertise changes over time and boundaries can get out of date. Boundaries can become barriers between people, if they are jealously guarded. Alternatively, boundaries can be a point at which we acknowledge that something has changed and must adapt to new circumstances. This paper looks at how boundaries have been created in design and engineering in the last two centuries, the ways in which they have affected our understanding of our work and possible ways to improve matters.

Read on...

Background reading - Patrick Whitney

An interesting article in Business week on Patrick Whitney from IIT:

Design Visionary
Patrick Whitney is out to bridge the chasm between the cultures of business and design

Looking for talent? Of course you are. A titanic talent search is under way as managers scour the globe for innovators. Companies are struggling to transform themselves from cultures driven by cost and quality control to organizations that profit from creative thinking. Everybody knows where to find Six Sigma black belts, financial hotshots, and vice-presidents into Total Quality Management. Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, and lots of B-schools churn them out. But innovators?
Enter Patrick Whitney, a 54-year-old Canadian native who is director of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, the largest graduate school of design in the U.S. Whitney is a visionary, a key leader in a new movement to create a discipline of design. Like W. Edwards Deming, who transformed the "mushy" notion of quality into the rigorous, useful TQM methodology, Whitney is turning design into a core methodology of innovation. In doing so, this soft-spoken man has quietly become the guru of integrating the best of business and design thinking.

Read on...