Embedding Design in the Organisational Culture: Challenges and Perspectives

Organisations are complex systems rooted in their own practices, procedures, knowledge, and values: in a word rooted in their own specific culture. Organisational cultures must evolve with the different changes that constantly occur within their boundaries, as well as in the external contexts in which they are immersed (Schein, 1985). Organisations in the last decades have been massively solicited to become competitive in their innovation processes, and Design Thinking has been celebrated as a generic innovation process applicable across sectors and organisations to rapidly and successfully deal with innovation (Brown, 2008, 2009; Martin, 2009; Dorst & Cross, 2001; Liedtka & Mintzberg, 2006). It has been applied to the design and development of both hardware and software products, to the design of business models and services, and to the design of the buildings and spaces in which work takes place or within which companies interact with their customers. While Design Thinking has developed as a concept directly connected with the processes of innovation management, both in managerial and design reflections (Buchanan, 1992) and in the practices of many design consultancies, scarce attention has been placed on the study of the interactions between organisations and design, as practice and as culture. To fulfil this gap the authors start from the premise that a profound difference exists between the concept of Design Thinking (Brown, 2008) as a mechanic innovation management model; and that of design culture as a set of situated practices, instruments, competences and values to be internalised (Julier, 2000, 2006; Kinbell,2011, 2012). While a simple stimuli-response model seems to underpin the first: management makes an intervention, the organization responds; the second claims for a cultural view of design that should be understood as processual and situated within the larger context of the organisation culture and not as a fixed essence. Also the existing scientific literature describing frameworks for the introduction of design culture in organisations depict a process made of different stages (e.g.: The Danish Design Ladder; The Design Maturity Level Grid proposed by Gardien and Gilsing 2013; The five phases of design integration proposed by Porcini, see de Vries, 2015), representing it as a ladder or a sequence of phases that, if followed in the exact order, will conduct to the integration of design in the organisation. But, these frameworks may not always fit in with the diverse cultural settings in which the transition may take place, nor may they fully capture the co-existence of diverse design practices and subculture within the same organisation.