A take on approach to Design Management

This is an article as part of a brief summary on Design Management course at NID Bangalore.

The Design Management class started with the notion to test ourselves how well we do manage design as a creative field starting from as basic as trying to find your first job to pitching a design proposal as a design firm.

I personally belong from an architectural background, where I have worked for nearly four years. In midst I had opened my own freelance works but found very hard both to gather clients on a regular basis and manage finance from them. Ultimately after a hard trial of six months I had to quit.

From the above experience I was very reluctant in going about freelancing, as I always felt it was underpaying. Even after Joining NID, I was not very sure how much to charge the client for? Well all these questions were duly answered by Makarand and Chinmay our course moderator from there experiences, I felt-

As part of the first submission, which was a story about how I landed my first project, I was not sure if the story actually was on the right track. But as we role played ourselves as design firm and client, I was faced with issues which I would actually face in real life, but this time I was confident enough to tackle them in a professional way. This boosted my confidence and even the later submission of business proposal was an attempt to validate myself with the same. The course continued about how to manage various types of clients and how to use design literature as a business tool and not only as a creative one. Design learning is part of churning our creative skill while design management has a lot to do with its execution. As its always said -

While we discuss a lot about managing through discussions and verbal techniques, one major thing we always want to move away from is the monetary value. The question always arises that is it bad to be money minded? After this session I got my answer, and it’s a straight NO. It’s not bad. We get paid for our value we bring into a system and we should not be shy about to ask for it. As someone rightly said-

Concluding I would like to add that the course ended with a deep thought that even after managing various things including design, a big part lies in the textual and bookish knowledge through contracts, non-disclosure agreements, copyrights and IPR. Understanding these take years, so management in design is a comprehensive mixture of managing yourself, employees, client, customer to design to legal issues to the execution of the design and ultimately building a relationship with the ecosystem and not just surviving in the system.

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