Design Management
Summary
Design management has evolved into a strategic discipline that orchestrates the planning, organisation and governance of design activities to deliver business value and competitive advantage. At its heart lies the view of design as a dynamic capability: a firm’s capacity to sense emerging opportunities or threats, seize them through creative problem framing and prototyping, and transform organisational assets accordingly. This requires cross-functional collaboration among marketing, engineering and leadership, underpinned by a coherent design vision and governance structure. Practically, design management encompasses tasks as varied as defining user-centred requirements, coordinating multi-disciplinary design teams, aligning brand and product aesthetics, and embedding iterative feedback loops across the development cycle. By integrating design into corporate strategy, firms can foster resilience in volatile markets, accelerate innovation, and cultivate meaningful customer experiences. Globally, design managers have demonstrated how systematic design leadership—from high-tech product platforms to service-oriented public sector initiatives—can shorten time-to-market, enhance brand loyalty and support sustainability goals. As organisations grapple with increased complexity and rapid change, design management offers a structured yet flexible toolkit for steering creative efforts toward tangible economic and social impact.
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Research from all publishers
Recent bibliometric work has mapped the swift expansion of arts-based management scholarship, tracking its emergence as a coherent research domain. This analysis identifies thematic clusters around organisational aesthetics, creative process practices and methodological rigour, and highlights the need for deeper empirical studies on implementation models. In parallel, a conceptual proposal known as the “beautiful strategy” framework argues that aesthetic perception and felt meanings can be systematically harnessed in strategic planning to bridge organisational purpose with stakeholder experience. By integrating sensory cues and narrative imagery into decision-making, the framework suggests organisations can enhance alignment, stakeholder engagement and sustainable value creation. Complementing these theoretical advances, case research on “gambiarra” practices in cultural event production examines how improvised, resource-constrained interventions resolve tensions between material limitations and aesthetic aspirations. These studies illuminate a model of adaptive, context-sensitive innovation that can inform design management in complex project environments across industries.
Design Management publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in design management across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Dynamic capabilities: Organisational routines that enable firms to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments.
Organisational aesthetics: The sensory and symbolic dimensions of organisational life, including spatial, material and narrative elements that contribute to meaning-making and identity.
Arts-based management: The deliberate use of artistic methods and creative practices within managerial processes to foster innovation, reflection and adaptive capacity.
Co-creation: A collaborative approach in which stakeholders actively participate in the design and development of solutions.
Gambiarra: Improvised technical-aesthetic solutions devised under resource and time constraints, demonstrating creative adaptability in practice.
References
- Arts-Based Management between Actions and Conjunctions: Lessons from a Systematic Bibliometric Analysis. Administrative Sciences (2023).
- A beautiful strategy – bridging the gap between the (aesthetic) perception and (strategic) realization of the organizations purpose. VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems (2022).
- Gambiarra as an Emergent Approach in the Entanglement of the Organizational Aesthetic and Technical Controversies: The Samba School Parade Case. BAR - Brazilian Administration Review (2020).
- A Review of Research on Design Management and Dynamic Capabilities.
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