Jess McMullin over at bplusd has created and visual graphic of the Business and Design Landscape for 2007.
Its looks pretty interesting as it contains a decent breakdown of not just consulting firms, but also schools, events, publications, and corporate groups.
We liked the way of how he clearly divided the consulting firms, schools and corporate teams into distinctively clear categories – companies and schools led by design, business, research and insight. This is important as the design industry is so varied and its a good way to see all the different focuses. Jess’s classification can be use as a design tool as it basically marks out some interesting trends in our own design industry.
Times are changing, we notice that companies are not solely run by the engineering functions anymore and many position themselves to focus more on innovation businesses and/or innovative design concepts as a means to differentiate them in the market these days.
As working designers, we can see how the market leaders are moving to and how we can even be the change-makers for the companies that we work for.
As aspiring design students, we can see and apply our design strengths, (such as more design focus, entrepreneural, or more research-oriented etc) before we can apply to the right firms that can best apply our abilities.
Finally even for non-designers, this is a rather good map for you to understand the world of Design + Business and also see how you can partake in it.
As mentioned by the writer this list is a draft and thus have its holes even though it gives a fairly clear overview. For one we liked to see a little less focus of the US centric design landscape. There are a lot of interesting movers and shakers in the design industry in both Europe and Asia, which is noticeably lacking here. Also missing are the strong Asian consultancies and design schools.
We are also a little confused as some classifications are incorrect, for example after all that D-School talk, Stanford is classified as a design lead school? Is it not business lead?
The other thing is the list of design blogs; they seem more of to me a collection of personal blogs of people who are part of the speaking tour and not any that actually share much of their work on their blog, perhaps there should be another catagory for Speakers. Some notable design blogs, design networks and innovation thinking blogs missing include Core 77, John Maeda, Seth Goldin and Design Sojourn, of course!
All in all great work Jess and we look forward to the final visual map.
Original Post: http://www.designsojourn.com/trends-in-the-2007s-business-and-design-landscape/
