I was recently invited to become the project manager for a new company, and its associated business plan and launch program. I was hired, because I had worked with the sponsoring company before as a consultant and they saw that I was results oriented.
It was difficult though, I was responsible for managing a team to bring a product to launch, while simultaneously being out of the inner circle of creative of the sponsoring company. Not only this, but the owner of the sponsoring company was a designer. Hence him hiring me to manage the people, time, money, and other resources to bring product to launch.
Berkin talks about making things happen, and that is exactly what I was required to do here. Nonetheless, there were some experiences that were didactic and humiliating.
An ordered list was the priority of my start of project planning with the company. Moreover, inculcating the creative views of the team was paramount to my success here, and that includes working with them on the priorities list. This is something that I did not do originally, causing unspoken animosity. The team thought that I had assumed (and egotistically) the list was without regard to their thoughts. That I was there to order them.
Recommendations in this avenue, going forward, would be to have that initial pre-meeting meeting. One where voices are heard, accepted, discussed, and established. Moreover, I find it beneficial (especially with creative, in the interest of making deadlines) to set aside a meeting time for this. A few hours, but the catch here is that this is the limitation of input. In order to move forward, we can’t sit and discuss a creative possibility over a certain limit. This limit forces constraints upon the discussion, and therefore ensures that results will be generated.
Directly following this step, is the outline of tasks, milestones, and resources projections. The important step here, is a consideration towards the systemic nature of a creative project. This systemic factor is why there is a project manager. If something were to change in the finance aspect of things, or a delivery date, then this will have a rippling effect throughout the project plan. Berkin was right when he said “make sure that they always map to each other” in reference to the deliverables, resources, and overall plan.
Trials and Tribulations of Management
Some of my work...
LOCAL BLOGGER A PART OF FIRST-EVER
WORLDWIDE BLOG COLLABORATION
Rishi Desai a student of Parsons The New School for Design in New York City is one of 104 marketing bloggers from 10 nations authoring The Age of Conversation, an e-book to benefit children’s charity
New York City -- A local blogger is part of what may be a first-of-its-kind collaboration via the internet, involving more than 100 marketing professionals who blog from 24 states and 10 nations. Rishi Desai of New York City joined online with other bloggers to write The Age of Conversation, a book that will be published July 16. In addition to the downloadable e-version, the book will be available in hardcover and softcover. All proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity.
The book has an unusual story behind it, involving online connections between people around the world who have never met each other.
Drew McLellan, who heads McLellan Marketing Group, an advertising agency here, has been writing a blog online for since September 2006. His blog is among the 25 most-read marketing blogs in the world. McLellan’s partner in this adventure is another marketing blogger in the top 25, Gavin Heaton. Heaton is the Interactive Director of one of the world’s leading marketing and promotions agencies, Creata, where he is Director of Interactive.
In March, McLellan wrote about Wharton’s effort to create a collaborative book and Heaton commented, “And it sounds like it could be fun ... but you know what, Drew? I reckon between a few of us we could knock out a short book and publish it. All we need is a theme and a charity ... “
“Three e-mails later, we had named the book and the charity. It just fell into place, McLellan said. “The Age of Conversation was the prefect topic. The marketing industry is abuzz about how the citizen marketers are changing the landscape. This book captures that new phenomenon,” he added.
McLellan and Heaton, through their blogs, invited other marketing professionals and other bloggers to commit to writing an essay about conversation. They set what they thought would be an impossible goal – 100 bloggers. They received commitments from 104 authors in less than 7 days.
“What began as a comment online has grown into a major collaborative effort by marketing professionals from 24 states and nations, beyond the U.S.,” said McLellan. “Gavin and I were overwhelmed with the response.”
“We heard from people, telling us what they planned to write about,” Heaton added. “We’ve been amazed at the variety of approaches that have been taken, and with hardly any duplication or overlap. This book really explores the art of conversation and how that is changing the face of marketing from virtually every angle possible.”
My contribution is already printed for you below..
A fellow marketing blogger in New York, Christina Kerley, had just lost her mother and many in the marketing blogging community were looking for a way to comfort her from afar. McLellan and Heaton decided that they would dedicate the book to Sandra Kerley, their colleague’s mother.
The Age of Conversation will be available in all three formats on July 16. Prices will be:
e-book: $9.99 ($7.99 going to charity)
paperback book: $16.95 ($8.10 to charity)
hardback book: $29.99 ($8.55 to charity)
Orders will be taken online at: http://stores.lulu.com/ageofconversation
Authenticity in Design: What¿?¿
The notion of authenticity is a motif that seems to be surfacing in this time. Transparancy, authenticity, and trust... things that I can refer my relationships to. This doesn´t seem to surprise me that it is becoming apparant to ¨people¨ that a secure and authentic connection to their designed environments is ever important.
Moreover, recognizing that the design of the table at which you sit needs to be authentic is a difficult idea to understand. By this, I mean that you must see the designer´s true intentions manifested in the design that you use, and those intentions were not distorted for other purposes.
But what are a designer´s intentions? I think a designer´s intentions should be that which one designs for facil use.
Facilitate Better Learning by Breaking The Cycle
Conversations are taking place all around us, and in this Conversation Age, we are looking to learn a thing or two from them. My idea for this chapter came while reading an article in Harvard Business Review by Chris Argyris.
What is the quality of insight gained for the curator of the conversation? Moreover, ask yourself the question, are we addressing the more fundamental impulsions behind the responses from the newly formed community of conversationalists?
As the curator of the conversation, you are seeking to learn from the players involved. But also, you are seeking to further facilitate and massage the conversation forward with hopes to gain maximum insight. The problem arises with curatorial benevolence.
The curator strays from questioning the assumptions and fundamental biases in responses from the players of the conversation. These assumptions and fundamental biases are laid in the early formation of the group involved. A sense of communal identification is borne from active listening, conscious participation, and purposeful speaking.
This initial process of respectful engagement will inherently lay a foundation that must be shaken for optimal insight. Most importantly, as this identity develops, the curator usually takes a passive role. Passivity is the result of the curator’s fear that he or she will discourage the players from participation.
This passivity is a disservice to net learning. As a sense of community develops, fundamental assumptions are not addressed behind player responses. A cyclical process of learning develops as a result. The sense of communal assumptions (identification) with other conversationalists contributes to closing the circle, further continuing the cyclical process. This continues until the curator steps in to question the communal assumptions, thus breaking the circle, and allowing for deeper insight.
The curator must act as a catalyst at his or her recognition of this cyclical learning. The curator must seek to disturb the harmony when they detect cyclical or homogeneous responses, by questioning fundamental impulsions behind the responses. They are not destroying communal identification, but allowing for a more sustainable and beneficial learning process. Argryis calls this the double loop and single loop phenomenon, I am adapting it here, calling it “a need for cyclical breakout.”
Are Designers the Enemy Of Design?
Nussbaum recently gave a talk at my school, that caused quite the stir. He details how the dynamic and evolution of the design process has brought us to this new form of design, where everyone is a designer and that design by ego is destroying the potential and requisite of today's designs. (Pic: Philip Stark Juicer)
Nussbaum said that "designers suck" and are in need of a paradigm shift for sustainability. I have to agree, but disagree. As a student of Design Management, we are not IN NEED of a paradigm shift, at least I don't see that, but rather, we are undergoing a paradigm shift. To me, when I graduate in a year, I will work in a market where sustainability is presumed to take importance. Maybe bottom line business men will tell me otherwise, but more and more I am reading of how they, too, now realize the impetus in sustainability to grow that bottom line over time.
As we breed this new form of designer, we are making history, in fact, defining the management of the process. Design management is the facilitation of the design process in the interests of all of those at stake. This inculcates sustainability amongst other things, but it is not apparent (reference to apple's counter-sustainable products).
My thoughts? In response, NextD did a whole write up drawing from the brightest minds in design of today and yesterday. There is strong potential in society for sustainability and participatory design. This process and its importance in the administration of business is exemplified by the emergence of Design&Management departments at Parsons, Pratt, Stanford, and Harvard.
This nascent industry embodies the profit-potential held in participatory design while strongly entertaining sustainability as a priority before achieving anything with popular culture. I would know, I am a student who is on the receiving end of courses and lectures of design management training.
I am frankly excited by the emergence of this MANAGEMENT-DESIGN pedagogy, as it transfers power to those who know and appreciate from those who are ignorant... so designers don't suck, business sucks. Good thing though, because as I see it, business models for the day after tomorrow are being learned today, in dschools.
One Shape For All and For All One Shape
Alan McCollum, who turns 63 this year, has a long-standing interest in formal replication, and his work frequently addresses questions of materiality and value. (His installations lead one to rapidly conclude that the lofty promises of modernism aren't likely to be fulfilled anytime soon: here in McCollum's orbit, more = less.) He also possesses the entrepreneurial spirit that has come to characterize a number of contemporary artists who think pluralistically about making work. His shapes, for example, can be used for many different purposes, “not only for fine art and design projects,” notes his gallery’s press release, “but also for various social practices: as gifts, awards, identity markers, emblems, insignias, logos, toys, souvenirs, educational tools and so forth.”
The relationship between shapes and social practices is, at its core, an essential design conceit — from typographic identity to architectural megastructure, giving form to ideas is what designers do. But McCollum’s project goes beyond mere morphology, embracing a kind of über-solution in its very claim. Endlessly permutable, teeming with indefinite potential, McCollum’s strategic genius lies in his appeal to a culture hungry for the quick fix. The Shapes Project promises maximum gain with minimum effort: better living through geometry.
It's not so much the shapes themselves as the idea of the shapes, the very notion of a system of forms that's so captivating. And so unnerving. If I were to identify the one prevailing topical interest that has most surfaced in the last year — among students, in juries, at conferences and exhibitions — it would have to be this obsession with series and systems. How to identify them; how and where to introduce them; the question of whether, once a series is identified, your work is done. It's the illusion of certainty that's so mesmerizing — the idea that not everything is in flux, unfixed and mashed-up and dislocated. Systems by their very nature introduce an armature as well as a roadmap for their own completion. You look at one iteration, then two — then ten — and you get it. Once demystified, you can concentrate on other things — form, perhaps, or beauty. A glorious insect. A Trollope poem. Your lunch.
Or not. Which begs the question: does a system invite psychological repose precisely because it is so clear and comprehensible — or does it lead us to search for precisely its opposite — a kind of exotic deviation from the norm, an abstraction or glimmer of novelty? McCollum stresses that he laboriously created each of these shapes, and resists the notion that this body of work emerged from a kind of robotic (read "vector generated") process. Is artistry compromised if software is involved? Is design?