Dear Vinay,

Thanks for your post, and thanks for the link to the blog.

You summarized it beautifully, "... in a real world you make trade-offs and a
designer has to make intelligent
tradeoffs and not what the engg. or product manager says .... please understand
I am not against
designers or 'innovation' or 'creativity'. I just want to share views and learn
on how does someone move from UI product design to more strategic design and
talk abt business model design...."

These days, it is increasingly less controversial to state that we must reflect
on what we do, that design thinking must be strategic, that we require empirical
research as the foundation of advanced design for good solutions in the real
world.

Back in the late 1980s, Scandinavian design schools were not interested in
strategic design. As a result, I developed the first course in strategic design
for a business school. This led to a professorial appointment at the Norwegian
School of Management, something that served me well, as it gave me time for
serious design research in an era when the design schools did not support
research. That, in turn, brought me to where I work now, at a university-based
design school.

It is no coincidence that several of the leading design schools on the Business
Week 60 list are actually business schools.

To design effectively requires solving the problems that our clients bring us.
This requires a rich array of skills and knowledge. Thanks for pointing this
out.

Warm regards,

Ken




Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

Telephone +61 3 9214 6755
www.swinburne.edu.au/design