Graduate: How new designers can high-tail it into business

Design graduates may have excelled on their course, without having learnt the ways and requirements of business. Hugh Aldersey-Williams reports on an innovative MA that aims to fill the gaps.

Everyone knows the deal when a company takes on a young designer or other "creative". The newcomer gains work experience. The company, not to put too fine a point on it, gets cheap labour and cheap creative ideas.

But what can a student design manager bring to a well-oiled corporation? Plenty, says Naomi Gornick, course director of a ground-breaking master of arts degree programme entitled "Design, Strategy and Innovation" at Brunel University.

British designers are highly regarded around the world. But ironically, British companies sometimes show little propensity to make effective use of this home-grown talent. They seem to be incapable of making time for people who do not look and think like them. Designers, for their part, often have little patience with company ways.

Gornick believes she can bridge that gap with her course, which provides a year's management training with a strong emphasis on industrial placement. "The intention is to unlock new career routes for design-based graduates directly in industry," she says.

A handful of design management courses are now on offer in Britain. The degree programmes have in some cases been reshaped in response to upheavals in the education system and in the business world, so that they now provide courses which work directly with industry in mind. Some have grown up within design schools, others within business schools; there is discussion as to what is the best place for them. In Gornick's view, both routes offer value, training design managers with perspectives that would enable them readily to collaborate in a commercial environment.

Brunel's one-year full-time course is in its fourth year. Early graduates have found employment where they can put their design skills to work at a strategic level and often well beyond the realms of the drawing-board. One became a consultant at Coopers & Lybrand, another is a research analyst at the office furniture company Herman Miller and a third joined Rover's business re-engineering research team. Others went into strategic design management or creative development at Motorola, Waterford, Wedgwood and the Body Shop.

This autumn, a two-year part-time version was started in response to demand from designers in consultancies and managers in industry. Royal Mail, Hasbro Toys and British Airways and leading design consultancies in Britain and Germany have put people on the course.

Brunel's is one of a handful of design departments to have obtained a coveted five-star rating in the recent Research Assessment Exercise. The Design, Strategy and Innovation course is the only one of its type in the country to enjoy support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. It has awarded seven pounds 10,000 bursaries, which help half the students on the course.

The MA begins with a management theory course. Following that, students work as a team undertaking a design audit within a selected company. That leads to individual internships.

The four-week audit is designed to look at how a selected company manages aspects of its design and innovation. The internships last 12 weeks and typically take the form of a one-person research-based project. Students gain first-hand experience of the business world and have ample opportunity to demonstrate their potential for further employment.

In 1995 at British Airways, a Brunel undergraduate internee was given three days to see how many marques the airline was using. He came back with 114 individual logos. The exercise was an important part of the preparation for the new corporate identity which the company launched this summer. Mike Crump, a design manager at British Airways and one of the first graduates from Gornick's course, last week won one of the Design Business Association's Design Effectiveness Awards for the remodelling of the airline's first- class seating.

The direct involvement in business leads to a fusion of design skills and business skills. Stephen Challis, another of the first intake who is now group design manager at BAA, still finds his ability to field tricky questions about his creative proposals acquired during critiques of student design projects useful in management discussions, for example. The critique process is unique to the creative disciplines and something that traditional management students have rarely experienced.

Sam Livingstone has not yet graduated, but has begun working as a design planner for the Korean car manufacturer Daewoo, following his internship with the company. "The main thing that I have taken from the course is not just information and facts, but a holistic and deep understanding of design within its business context," he says. Working in a large team of designers and design engineers, his varied research activities provide the wider context for the design work. He finds also that he is a natural conduit for communication with management.

Conventional management trainees seldom learn anything about design. Many designers' business skills are poorly developed when it comes to understand the ways in which their client organisations actually work. Their natural enthusiasm for their subject serves them poorly if they try to sell design too soon or too blatantly. Brunel's students learn to read the lie of the land so that they can make their presence felt more effectively within the corporation. "Designers can be evangelical, sometimes not seeing points of view other than their own," Gornick says. "Ours put forward the design message at the right time.

"To bring design in as an afterthought is expensive, time-wasting and counter-productive to raising the status of design. Monitoring when an aspect of design should be introduced effectively is one of the major responsibilities of our graduates. I maintain that it is primarily the manager with a design background who will have this innate knowledge and not the manager with management training."