Bottom-Up Design Leadership as a Strategic Tool

By Ki-Young Nam, Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial Design, KAIST; Mi-Jin Jung, MS Candidate, Department of Industrial Design, KAIST

From the Design Management Review, Summer 2008

Bottom-up leadership (in which employees become empowered to offer their ideas and innovations that percolate up to the higher levels of management) and thought leadership (in which nurturing new and useful ideas takes precedent over managing people and processes) have garnered much attention in the past few years. In the field of design, the impetus toward design leadership tends to come from the client to the designer (in other words, top-down leadership). Ki-Young Nam and his colleagues at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) hoped to prove that client and designer should share ownership of a design project-that design leadership could be provided from the design level to the strategic level by an outside consultant. Nam and his colleague, Mi-Jin Jung, offer a case study of a collaborative project shared by industrial designers at KAIST and Coway, a manufacturer of home appliances-a project that aimed to help Coway to discover a new market for its products.

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