It’s Not Business as Usual

Marilee Bowles Carey, a 49-year-old graduate student from Evanston, Illinois, is describing her Monday-evening class: “We have covered … the accounting equation,” she writes in an e-mail, “financial statements, the accounting cycle, accrual, accounting for sales, accounting for inventory, accounting for fixed assets, liabilities, interest, and owners’ equity.” These, she reckons, are “the basics,” which you’d expect Carey to say if she were an aspiring C.P.A. She isn’t. She’s a student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design.

From the auto shops at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies to the labs of Stanford University, design schools are grinding out students as deft at parsing balance sheets as they are at modeling foam core. In the halls of academia, design and business are at last on speaking terms. This is a dramatic shift for a profession that long operated according to what one professor calls the “over-the-wall method,” whereby designers, divorced as they were from commercial doings, would figuratively toss their wares over a partition to the moneymen on the other side. Now dozens of university programs worldwide, including some 30 in the United States, have devoted themselves to breaking down that wall. This fall the College for Creative Studies will open a new graduate-level design degree in tandem with the University of Michigan’s business school; the Bay Area’s California College of the Arts will usher in its first set of M.B.A. design strategists; and the Institute of Design, a forefather of the integration movement, will welcome its third class of dual M.B.A.–Master of Design students. Some elite schools are joining the fray too: the Harvard University Graduate School of Design recently announced a $1.5 million grant for an integrated design program, which encourages students to combine “business management principles…with design skills to improve project delivery, client satisfaction, and their firm’s bottom line.” As commercial enterprises warm to creativity, design education is recalibrating to help students navigate a market increasingly mad for innovation—and is itself being transformed in the process. “It’s probably one of the major trends in design education right now,” says Ed Dorsa, education vice president of the Industrial Designers Society of America. “We’re attempting to mimic in schools what we know is happening in the industry.”

Previous generations of burgeoning designers toiled predominantly under the designer-as-auteur ethos; that is, alone in a studio fashioning beautiful objects with their bare, heroic hands. Little effort went into teaching them entrepreneurship, a pursuit thought better left to the Willy Lomans of the world. “Back in the seventies at the University of Cincinnati, we were required to take an Intro to Marketing class,” recounts Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, who studied graphic design there. “But if you’ve ever taken those kinds of classes you know that they don’t equip you to understand or run a business any more than French 101 qualifies you to be headwaiter at La Coupole.”

So it was that 21 years ago Patrick Whitney, a soft-spoken designer who once publicly called for a class-action lawsuit against design schools for teaching a “value system no one else got,” took the helm of the graduate-level Institute of Design and set about tethering the curriculum to corporate America. It was a radical departure from the artifact factories of the day. (Whitney was educated at Cranbrook and the University of Alberta, two crown jewels of the studio model.) “With eighty percent of our projects, the students think about what the business angle would be,” Whitney says. “We have a course where students learn about the basic principles of [strategic-management expert] Michael Porter. We have courses that teach how companies approach the idea of risk. …What we’re really after is educating people who end up being leaders of innovation, and the combination of design thinking and business thinking is the way to do that.” Whitney boasts of graduates carving out high-powered positions at faddish companies such as IDEO and Hewlett Packard, or at white-shoe stalwarts like McKin­sey & Company. Steelcase, which owns a maj­or­ity of IDEO and manufactures furniture, aggressively recruits industrial-design students for jobs that extend beyond the scope of perfecting the swivel chair. “I’m particularly attracted to ID grad­uates because you can apply them in a broader set of problems,” CEO James Hackett says, pointing to an ID alumna who left the company’s research-and-development arm to tackle a “very important project” he cryptically describes as involving “the nature of our global organization.”

That a $3.1 billion corporation would assign an employee with a Master of Design to its international operations might make about as much sense as entrusting an M.B.A. to arrange flowers, but such is the tenor of the times. Globalization has forced companies to seek new tactics for edging out competitors, which means that innovation—whether an improved product or a reinvented office culture—is now a top priority. Consider U.S. investment in research and development, which has ballooned more than 800 percent from 1953 to 2000, according to data from the National Sci­ence Foundation. “Design thinking” has become a favored neologism among business magazines and executives, and books such as John Howkins’s The Creative Economy and Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class giddily detail the growing intersection of business, technology, art, and culture. As Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum tells it, “Innovation is the new black.”

Some design educators remain skeptical. “The business part is something that comes after you mas­ter the ability and practice in design,” says Ste­ven Heller, a professor at the School of Visual Arts. “The worst thing we can do is train people to be good businesspeople and bad designers.” Per­haps more troubling, the integration method has attracted zealous support, despite scant proof of its effi­cacy. Proponents point to impressive anecdotes—five patent applications in one class, 30 percent higher incomes among graduates, no evidence “that it doesn’t not work,” to quote one professor—but stumble when pressed to provide rigorous substantiation, lending the whole thing the air of religion, which is about the furthest thing from business and its bottom lines.

To the adherents of this new faith, Stanford’s “d.school” is a Vatican of sorts. To outsiders, it’s a window on both the movement’s greatest possibilities and its inherent limitations. The brainchild of IDEO cofounder David Kelley, himself a Silicon Valley deity, the three-and-a-half-year-old nondegree-granting institute opens up design education to graduate students universitywide—from M.B.A.s to product designers and philosophy Ph.D.s to geneticists—and urges them to release the creative process on corporate and social ills. The institute has taken on the famously rakish aspects of Silicon Valley culture: mobile furniture, scrawled-on dry-erase boards, ubiquitous Post-it notes, and the in-house shrink. Here students outfit elementary school classrooms with whiteboard tables said to encourage collaboration, hit the weld shop to revamp clunky irrigation pumps for Burmese farm­ers, and stalk employees at a San Francisco messenger-bag company for input on improving their corporate meetings. One assignment found students bounding about Oakland’s airport analyzing Jet Blue’s dreadful waiting lines; another had some 35 buttoned-up executives down on their knees changing tires, part of an exercise in redesigning Arco gas stations. Perry Klebahn, a consulting associate pro­fessor, recounts these exploits with glee. “We get on the field, and it’s crazy!” he says. “A total panic!”

At Stanford, business and design have integrated in other, perhaps less salutary respects. Some participating companies have requested that their d.school proj­ects remain confidential, as protection from copycat competitors. Corporate partnerships are, of course, vital to the institute’s aims, and if that comes at the expense of transparency—something other colleges stress in similar classroom-boardroom pairings—so be it. “We’re most concerned with great learning. If one of these com­panies can put something on the table that benefits the students, that’s more important to us” than disclosure, says the school’s cofounder and executive director, George Kembel, adding that proprietary partnerships with companies that are asked to give a gift to the school in return are “the exception rather than the rule.” Nevertheless, these are problematic relationships throughout the academic world. “When there are agreements that are not disclosed, it becomes difficult to evaluate our work,” says Marianne Jennings, an ethics expert at Arizona State University’s business school. “Trans­parency is critical for objectivity.”

For better or worse, this is where design education is headed, with designers-in-training adopting the habits, ethos, and language of the business world. “It’s a very technical approach to presenting information, as opposed to something like developing personal style or experimenting with the medium,” Bowles Carey says, discussing one of her studio classes. “None of that really matters. It mattered when I was an undergraduate. It doesn’t matter anymore.”