The Academy of Management Journal has decided to address “the importance of design and the value of design thinking.” The material shared is not significant because of innovative ideas presented, but due to the fact that it is targeted to general managers. For example, Gruber and his team tell their audience that “Applying design thinking to the design of work itself, the systems that support it, and the physical and virtual environments in which it takes place, or designing not only the customer and end-user but the employee experience, are opportunities for business and organizational leaders to attract and retain top talent, as well as to enhance productivity and operational effectiveness. However, firms are slow to respond to changing needs in the workforce and slow to grasp the opportunities…the application of environmental design to the physical workplace enables greater interaction, collaboration, and interdisciplinary working, as well as the capacity to move between the concrete or material world and the world of the imagination.”
Marc Gruber, Nock de Leon, Gerard George, and Paul Thompson.2015. “Managing By Design.”Academy of Management Journal, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 1-7.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.