Sharon Reier’s piece on design management consulting tunes into what I’m working on these days…

These firms operate quite differently from traditional strategy consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain, which work mainly with top management and use the concepts and techniques inculcated at top business schools. At the design firms, there is a “richer engagement that designers have as a starting point,” Seidel [a lecturer at the Said Business School at Oxford University] said, “because they have worked on projects together with different parts of the company and they know their capabilities.” What’s more, the designer’s visual capability gives “the capacity to expand rather than just reflect,” he added.

Just finished ready Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, a wonderful, powerful critique of modern architecture. At one point he describes how the International Style was killing demand for craftmanship, replacing Beaux-Arts architecture with glass boxes.

…to those who complained that International Style buildings were cramped, had flimsy walls inside as well as out, and, in general, looked cheap, the knowing response was: “These days it’s too expensive to build in any other style.” But it was not too expensive, merely more expensive. The critical point was what people would or would not put up with aesthetically.

We can see parallels today in design. Once a product has been Wal-Mart’ed, people feel it should be had inexpensively. It requires reinventing the product (e.g. Oxo) to change people’s minds.

I have to wonder if the same will be true with relocated design and development (the term offshored doesn’t seem appropriate, since so much of it is enabled by place-less telecommunications). Will those that craft a visual design, that believe code is poetry, go the way of the bronzeurs, marble workers, and model makers once that work is made permanently inexpensive?

Organizations that have hired talented designers don’t always produce good designs. For those of us who are designers, there are many, sometimes frustrating reasons. For organizations, there is a complex interworking of goals, communications, organizations, processes, tools, and relationships that may or may not positively influence the quality of design.

In the past ten years I’ve designed well over 30 digital products. Reflecting on all the people and companies I’ve worked with, the design work was only a fraction of what I actually did. For example, recently I’ve written about how I’ve been helping companies refine their goals, sharing the lessons of established disciplines, and approaching design from the business perspective.

So I’ve decided to deliberately do all of this, beyond designing products, to help organizations improve their design capabilities. I’ve resigned my full-time position and will soon start consulting with this new focus. It’s about achieving the innovation that comes from integrating design practices on the strategic level, managing products, and building the right teams and processes to reach business goals. If you head an organization and would like to improve how you manage design, email me: victor at victorlombardi.com.

These are wicked problems that can’t be solved by applying someone else’s best practices or installing yet another software package. They get to the core of how people work together to make great design possible. And I’m pretty damn excited to do it.