6. How Much Should Everyone in the Company Understand About Design?
In helping everyone to contribute to an integration of design activity under one umbrella,
everyone needs to understand some basics about design. This should begin with a senior
management team and then be cascaded upwards and downwards.
· Similarities and differences between design and creativity
· Company “know how”, new knowledge and design.
· How existing mind sets can be challenged by new design knowledge.
Design and Creativity
Design and creativity have certain things in common but they are not the same thing. The
early stages of creativity are characterised by the existence of rather fuzzy implicit ideas,
plenty of divergent thinking, a tolerance of ambiguity and the use of intuition. Also there is
the need for experimentation and iteration or re-thinking. In the early stages of design, ideas
quite rapidly give way to the creation of a strong concept or common vision which is tested
out for feasibility. The later stages of creativity see more precise and explicit ideas, a tendency
for convergent thinking, with a greater use of analysis and a concern for tests that prove
consistency. The later stages of design move into considerations of capability, in issues such
as production and market and customer acceptance. We can see that the early stages of design
incorporate both stages of creativity while the later stages of design incorporate only the later
stages in creativity.
The majority of individuals have the capability to be creative and as a consequence have a
contribution to make to design processes. But it is worthwhile to remember that the
differences in styles of thinking can affect where someone can make a contribution most
comfortably. There are two broad sets of preferences in styles of thinking, a preference for
facts, history and experience, or, a preference for metaphor, imagery and intuition. People for
whom the first set is preferable are more comfortable with aspects of explicit knowledge in
measurement, controls, processes and specification. People who are attracted to the latter set
are more comfortable with implicit or tacit knowledge in discourse, ideas, ambiguity and
emergence or evolution. To achieve a well balanced industrial design process both aspects
are essential.
It is overly simplistic to consider that the majority of industrial designers come from the
implicit knowledge camp and that the majority of engineers come from the explicit