This is connected to my post about career paths for designers. The bottom line is that more often than not individual contributors are not rewarded (in compensation and status) as much as "managers".
What I think we really want is not to become something simply because that role is what is rewarded, but to elevate the status and compensation of what we do as individual contributors. Why can't a great designer within a company have the status, political power, and compensation of a Vice President? (in a few cases they do, but it's not the norm). But to become a manager, when "managing" is an entirely different discipline and requires different talent, just to conform to a broken system, seeking better rewards, seems like the wrong path to me... -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Christopher Fahey Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2007 8:48 PM To: IxDA Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] d schools Mark Schraad wrote: > nice article on desgin talent and d-schools on this morning's bweek I don't understand why those of us who design things keep praising "d- schools" and "design thinking". The theory behind design thinking & d-schools is, to me, this: "Design is important. Too important to be managed by those fuzzy people who actually do design. It's time for designers to step aside and allow themselves to be led by a new generation of MBAs who have taken a couple of courses about design (but who don't do design)." How does this help us? It seems to me that the purpose of a D-School is to rob us designers of a career path and to allow MBAs to manage us instead of allowing us to pull ourselves up into corporate management. It circumvents what I deeply believe is the natural evolution of business towards more design-centric (which is to say user experience design-oriented) management. We designers, I think, are too starry-eyed and flattered by the term "design thinking" ("Ooh, they want business people to think like I do!") to notice that it may well be a tool to pull us out of the management loop. What do you think? -Cf Christopher Fahey ____________________________ Behavior biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com me: http://www.graphpaper.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] List Guidelines ............ http://beta.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://beta.ixda.org/help Unsubscribe ................ http://beta.ixda.org/unsubscribe Questions .................. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home ....................... http://beta.ixda.org ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
