The importance of design management
Design management, like other forms of operations management, is about managing the demands placed on the product, the process and the people during industrial project development . The activity of “managing”, reduced to its classical form, includes (a) planning, (b) organising, (c) commanding and coordinating, (d) monitoring and controlling. These functions are directed at ensuring that the designers are deployed appropriately and productively to achieve solutions. The natural world provides us with boundless examples of solutions that have been found through the iterative work of evolution. Evolution is the process by which the characteristics of living organisms change over generations and which can result in those organisms being better adapted to their goals. These adaptations, whether being the capacity to fly or the capability to convert sunlight into chemical energy are, in a sense, solutions. Similarly, design development explores multiple potential pathways to achieve a d...