Management of Design

Extract

An informal discussion meeting of the Management Studies Group of the Society took place on 1st April, 1969. Mr. Barry Turner opened the discussion, and has summarised the proceedings.

Design management is concerned with the exercise of mental, verbal and graphical skills which are so directed and controlled to meet a social need or needs. Any manager's job can briefly be stated as being composed of two complementary parts:

• (i) Deciding what has to be done, and

• (ii) assuring that the appropriate actions are taken to achieve the decisions taken.

The functions of a manager are concerned with; forecasting, planning, organising, controlling, evaluating and directing. In practice these tend to spiral around as time proceeds, and may be depicted as in Fig. 1. In the centre of this diagram is the important factor of motivation which all good managers have and are able to inject into their staff. In engineering, design is the necessary prelude to the manipulation of matter. But before design ideas can be turned into hardware they have to be transferred through the design process.