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Vita Activa: On Relationships Between Design(ers) and Business

How do designers actually work for business organizations that previously may have neglected1 to cater to their design issues? A plethora of specialist designers has emerged2 and they currently are offering their productive services in multiple ways to business firms and other organizations that still tend to be partly ignorant of design approaches and expertise.3 The relatively young profession of modern “industrial design” 4 is a case in point because industrial designers commonly offer their productive services to managers, who often are unfamiliar with their specialism.5 The highly experienced, Milan-based, German industrial designer Richard Sapper, working for IBM and several other companies, recently claimed: “Today, in many corporations, design decisions are in the hands of people without the slightest knowledge of the subject, asking consumers what they want.” 6 Rather than predicting the need of more knowledge or organizational “absorptive capacity” 7 on the one hand, or “survival of the fittest” designers in competitive markets on the other, we need to zoom in on living-work relationships between designers and organizational people to understand their interacting abilities and “lifeworlds” while working together. When I started to explore how designers actually work with firms and vice versa, I therefore chose this route—as an industrial organization researcher—approaching the field of design-business collaboration in a fairly open manner to see how it occurs. As I became increasingly aware of the complexities and unconsciousness of design issues in many organized settings, one nagging question emerged as potentially significant: How might dynamic capabilities8 in designing repeatedly be enabled in connection with organizations when organized agents were working, often temporarily, with designers? This seemed almost paradoxical; how to stabilize something that seemed to be in constant flux?