Page 224 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

212 Design Meets Business
ting research (e.g. Dunne & Martin 2005; Glen, Suciu & Baughn 2014) that emphasizes the benefits of teaching students in business schools ‘design’. On the one hand, it can help students to become familiar with methods and tools that can trigger creativity. Such tools can include ‘customer jour- neys’, a ‘design criteria plan’, ‘conducting user interviews’ and organizing ‘co-creation workshops’ (see also Fayard et al. 2017). On the other hand, teaching design in business schools can help students to develop a crea- tive approach that can be helpful not only in innovation processes but at all stages of organizing. It can help students to “face the uncertainties of real world and business problems where the means-end relationships are unknown” and move beyond their “sole reliance on analytical abilities” (Glen et al. 2014: 653).
In particular, as design commonly takes place in heterogeneous teams, it can help students to develop a collaborative attitude. It can help students to identify how complementary skills, while at the same time allowing them to discover new skills they might be interested in. Further, it can help students to embrace uncertainty, which is inevitable in creativity and inno- vation. It can help them develop the confidence that chaos is inevitable and they can create order out of chaos. Finally, elaborating on the idea that craftsmanship is key in design, it might be important for business students to learn how to ‘work with their hands’ and make things. In business schools, students are trained to write down their thoughts in texts (such as papers or in exams). Design, however, offers them another way – through materializing and visualizing - to make collaborative decisions, brainstorm ideas and envision alternative realities.
In the last two years of my PhD research, I was involved in the orga- nization and teaching of the course ‘Digital Innovation Lab’. In this inde- pendent course dedicated to doing innovation with a designerly approach, I got a first-hand experience of teaching design to business students. In both years, it was a key challenge to make them feel comfortable with the liminality, the in-betweenness, of creative processes. It was a challenge to convince them that it is normal not knowing what will come out of their creative processes, not knowing what will come next, let alone knowing what is a right or wrong step along the way. The students’ responses to such open-endedness was, often, creating certainty and order. For example, students found it challenging to brainstorm about possible solution direc- tions without sticking to their first idea. In order to tackle such issues, it was helpful to dedicate lectures that made them understand that chaos can invite for ‘innovativeness’ and giving case studies that showed that stic- king to the first idea is rarely beneficial. What was also especially helpful was that we tried to create a safe environment, in which students felt the