which deisgn management school is the best?
thats about all I want to know right now.
Thanks
Satwik
I would suggest T.S.H.K. - The School of Hard Knocks.
Seriously, there are about 12-14 Product Design Directors and maybe 8-10 Design Managers where I work, I don’t think any of them have a degree in design managment. Thay worked their way up as designers.
It’s probably different other places, hopefully someone will spark in some suggestions for you.
Yo is usually so probably right on this but if you want formalized Knocks i think the program at IIT basically builds managers. Especially if you already have an ID undergrad. You would go the MDM route I think.
my $0.2
yeah actually friday was the best day to ask this question- right on.
If you want some theory (which I believe is very underestimated if you really want to become a strong manager (it is seriously hard to bet traditional marketing people if you do not know their language), you could look into the Strategic Product Design program at the Faculty of Industrial design engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
hmm. I am not sure whether it works now, you see D.management is fairly new as a field so it worked to not have a degree till now, but things are changing… A lot of architects and artists started off what is now Industrial Design, evolution my dear friend is a way of life.
Try what I did… Get a design degree, work for a while, then get an MBA. Rubbermaid’s employee tuition reimbursement program paid for my MBA. My salary has almost doubled in the few years since I got the MBA.
Possessing the vocabularies of both design and business is worth it’s weight in gold in a corporate environment. Maybe not so much for consulting.
Try what I did… Get a design degree, work for a while, then get an MBA. Rubbermaid’s employee tuition reimbursement program paid for my MBA. My salary has almost doubled in the few years since I got the MBA.
do you end up being an MBA instead of a designer? what relationship do you have to the designing thing?
I guess Im wondering what it means to be a design manager w/ an MBA
Well, I’m not sure what “being an MBA” is like, but I leverage (a classic MBA term) my business background while I design and ramp-up new products.
In some cases, I use a financial model to determine if amortizing a tooling program will sink a whole new design program we are developing for a customer. This interactive process balances design and the ugly real world so we can get a product to market faster.
I also use my marketing background to help SELL the product though the food chains both internally and outside our company. Everyone is a salesman!!! Some better than others…
Understanding the vocabulary of accounting, finance, marketing, etc allows a designer to both create a new product and also get it launched. It’s the old “10% inspriation and 90% perspiration” story. If you want to be a design manager you need to understand the non-styling requirements of a new product. Most of those concepts are taught in business school, not design school.
I am currently in year number 3 of my dream job: I design new products (Solidworks), render & prototype them fast, sell them to companies like Target (yes I actually sell them too). Then I work with our factories in China and the US to ramp-up the products. How great is that? With the exception of working with an occaisional difficult buyer the process is slicker-than-snot!! Full control with no design-by-committee.
Without an MBA I would not be able to understand half of the things I run up against day to day. It’s one of the best decisions I have made. I don’t recommend it for everyone unless you are serious about getting into a management position.
So how is a design management degree different from a regular MBA? Most of us dont even that the temprament that one requires to go through the rigors of a regular MBA. Most of the places like IIT require you to have 3-4 years of experience in order to start the course. Then there is one in Pratt which I hear is quiet good but ir requires you to have a job running concurrently… for an international student ( such as myself ) that would be difficult to manage as well.
Any thoughts? 
I’m not sure what a degree in Design Management includes, so I can’t compare and contrast the two experiences.
Maybe someone with a design management degree can chime-in and tell us what the degree includes. I’d be interested in learning more about it. I have never met or worked with anyone with a bachelors or masters in Design Management. I think it must be a rare breed. It’s also a narrow degree. The reason I recommend an MBA is if you are ever tempted by the big money in marketing it’s easy to bail-out of design. You simply flip your two core competencies - product (Design) and marketing (MBA).