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| Brigitte Borja
de Mozota |
| Tom
Lockwood |
by Brigitte Borja de Mozota
Originally published in the April 2006 edition of Cercle du design et de la marque (France)
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: As DMI Life Fellow, I was very pleased to learn that you were elected to be the new president of the Design Management Institute, in January 2006. Could you tell us about your career until now?
Thomas Lockwood: I have worked approximately half my professional years on the design consultancy side and half on the corporate side. I started with degrees in visual design and marketing. I was first employed as an art director for a skiwear and mountaineering equipment manufacturer, but I liked using the products so much I began to make new ones. After several years designing new products, I was promoted to manage the firm’s R&D group. This gave me an early appreciation of several design disciplines, as well as an appreciation of the role of design management. A few years later, I opened my own design consultancy, which I ran for 10 years. Then I was hired by a client, a $2 billion multinational corporation in high technology; I thought it would be interesting to work for a large organization, in-house.I began by managing the internal design and creative services groups, and over the following years my responsibilities grew to become the global brand and design director and to include product design, communication design, environment design, and identity design. The company was acquired last year by Sun Microsystems, where I remained a group brand and design director before coming to DMI.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: Last summer, you finished your Phd, which is rather unusual for a designer.. Why did you want to do a PhD? Would you advise other professional to follow your example? What did you think of this experience?
Thomas Lockwood: I am very interested in research, as well as design and design management, so I felt that working on a PhD in design management would train me in both areas. It was a fascinating experience, and yet also the most difficult work I have ever done. I learned a great deal, and that was very rewarding. I think I was a far better student by taking this challenge on at a mid career point, because I knew where my professional interests lie; I knew that I wanted to be an expert in design management, and I felt this required academic knowledge as well as my practical experience in industry, and I had developed the discipline to achieve such goals and objectives. I recommend this to anyone who wishes to understand research, is willing to work extremely hard, and has discovered the topic he or she has the passion to pursue.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: Your research was on an integrated system of design decisions, and on the visual coherence of design. What were the results?
Thomas Lockwood: My research set out to discover how to integrate all design disciplines in large multinationals so that a company enables innovation in each design discipline and yet demonstrates visual coherency for the brand at the same time. I discovered ways to accomplish this, but in addition I found an underpinning issue, which is the need to produce design that is relevant to the end user. Very briefly, by combining coherence, innovation, and relevance, the design output is made to be meaningful to an organization’s stakeholders. As a result, I determined new models of integrated design management.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: Your Phd was in philosophy. It seems rather common for doctorate theses written by designers to be accepted by philosophers. But some universities are trying to develop Phd programs in design. Are you aware of these places?
Thomas Lockwood: Yes, I am aware of some of them, and have had many conversations on the subject. The big concern educators have is finding ways to quantify what a PhD in design actually consists of, what the requirements of completion are, and how they’re measured. For me, by going the traditional route in philosophy, I believe I learned much more about methodology, research, data analysis, theory development and application, and thus have a shared understanding with others who have PhDs.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: In your keynote speech at the international symposium on design management at the D2B conference in Shanghai, in March 2006, you developed a model in three parts for design management: process, people, culture. Can you explain?
Thomas Lockwood: I feel these are a good categorization of design management in large organizations. We need processes that are integrated within the business organization so that design can be used as a tool and as a way of thinking throughout the development process, as opposed to as a cosmetic addition at the end of the process. We need people who understand this, and who also understand how to apply design and design thinking from executives to individual contributors, and from designers and design managers to the other disciplines of business. And we need integration with corporate culture, because in the end, work that is outside the corporate culture and norms is rarely sustainable.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: Design management is the new buzz word in the US. DMI has recently collaborated on a website on design and innovation, together with BusinessWeek. Why?
Thomas Lockwood: Design is at the core of innovation; my definition of innovation is creativity plus design. My view is that successful innovation involves managed creativity plus managed design. Today, more and more businesses are recognizing design as a key strategic tool, but they also need to recognize the role of design management in bringing innovation to market. Every CEO would like to improve his or her results in innovation; actually most innovation fails. We are working to show them how to increase success rates by applying design management and design thinking to the process, and the most obvious way is to connect the dots between design and innovation.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: DMI had its annual international European conference, in Amsterdam in March, on the theme of design leadership. What do you think of design leadership? Should design managers change into design leaders?
Thomas Lockwood: Anyone responsible for work performance today needs at times be a leader, at times be a manager, and even at times to be an individual contributor. By connecting design management with leadership, we are simply trying to show the industry that true design effectiveness in business requires both leadership and management. We are not trying to create a new buzz word for design, we are simply trying to help the design industry realize that it is time for design to step up to the more strategic role of management and leadership in any organization.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: Where do you think the Design Management Institute is heading?
Thomas Lockwood: I think design management is becoming more recognized, and also becoming more diverse on a global basis. Therefore, DMI will continue to be a central focus of information about design management worldwide. In the future, you will see more research, more content about specific topics and about specific regional needs, more partnerships, and more membership services. Our membership growth will be based on geography and on areas of interest, as a global network of shared knowledge. To that end, you will see more collaborative projects from DMI, more partnerships with other institutions, councils, and members, and you will also see more publishing, both traditional and online. Or mission remains unchanged: To be the international authority, resource, and advocate on design management.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: Do you plan to develop DMI internationally, with DMI Europe and DMI Asia?
Thomas Lockwood: This year we will have conferences in The Netherlands, Korea, Canada and the United States, and we have members in 44 countries. Yet beyond our conferences and membership, larger international growth is difficult to achieve. While we intend to increase our knowledge sharing and local relevance globally, it is difficult to develop local meetings and venues based on our limited staff and resources. So there will be an ever more important online component to information dissemination, and likely more of our members will take up leadership roles in regional venues. There are varied needs for design management in different regions of the world, so perhaps our greatest challenge will be to address these needs with localized content.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota: Le cercle du design et de la marque is dedicated to a better understanding of branding. As a researcher working on design brand evaluation systems, are you thinking of developing a list of the top 20 design leadership brands?
Thomas Lockwood: Yes, this is indeed an interest of mine. I conducted a study a few years ago about this by evaluating the top 100 brand value companies based on seven different measurements of design performance. This could be refined and built upon by other researchers and the DMI. I would like to see DMI facilitate such research and help to establish some forms of global recognition that companies can use as benchmarks. Design management competency is a key part of our research priorities for 2006-2007.
Brigitte Borja de Mozota is Maître de Conférences, HDR, Université Paris X Nanterre / Nancy 2 and a DMI Lifetime Fellow.
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