Education (since the 2000s)




While design management had its origins in business schools, it has increasingly become embedded in the curriculum in design schools, particularly at the postgraduate level. Teaching design to managers was pioneered at the London Business School in 1976, and the first programme of design management at a design school was started in the 1980s at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and DeMontfort, Middlesex and Staffordshire Universities. Although, in the UK, some design management courses have not been sustainable, including those at the RCA, Westminster and Middlesex, other postgraduate courses have flourished including ones at Brunel, Lancaster and more recently the University of the Arts with each providing a specific point of view on design management.

The Design Leadership Fellowship at the University of Oxford was founded in 2005. In the same year the Stanford University Institute of Design founded the D-school, a faculty intended to advance multidisciplinary innovation. The Finnish Aalto University was founded in 2010 and is a merger of the three established Finnish universities – the Helsinki School of Economics (HSE), University of Art and Design Helsinki (TaiK), and University of Technology (TKK) – that had been cooperating on the IDBM design management program since 1995. Since 2006 the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland offers one of the few undergraduate studies in design management, completely taught in English.

Design schools in the United States are now offering graduate degrees in Design Management that focus on bridging the disciplines of design and business to lead organizations in the process of design thinking to create meaningful, human-centric value and business success through innovation. Among those offering M.A and M.F.A programs are:

  • Savannah College of Art and Design
  • Pratt Institute
  • University of Kansas
  • The New School

Design Management education is also gaining importance in other countries and awareness about role of design in business in increasing. In India in the last decade some of the leading design schools have been offering Masters program in Design Management.

  • MIT Institute of Design Pune - Master of Design in Design Management
  • National Institute of Design- Strategic Design Management
  • WE School - Business Design
  • ISDI- Strategic Design Management
  • World University of Design

BusinessWeek annually publishes a lists of the best programmes that combine design thinking and business thinking (D-schools 2009 and D-school Programmes to Watch 2009). The article Finland – World´s Innovation Hot Spot in the Harvard Business Review shows the interest of business leaders in the blended education of design and management. Business Schools (such as the Rotman School of Management, Wharton University of Pennsylvania and MIT Sloan Executive Education) have acted on this interest and developed new academic curricula.

Integrated education models are emerging in the academic world, a model which is referred to as T-shape and π-shaped education. T-shaped professionals are taught general knowledge in a few disciplines (e.g. management and engineering) and specific, deep knowledge in a single domain (e.g. design). This model also applies to companies, when they shift their focus from small T innovations (innovations involving only one discipline, like chemists) to big T innovations (innovations involving several disciplines, like design, ethnography, lead user, etc.). Like in education, this shift makes breaking down silos of departments and disciplines of knowledge essential.

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