Dear student,
You are lucky. You are studying design management. One of the most exciting, inspiring, relevant and rich fields of study one can imagine. You have tremendously rich resources to support you: books, blogs, conferences, teachers and practitioners. Hell, if you’re lucky, you even have a great job lined up for you in the future. But that, dear student, won’t come for free. Here are ten inspirational guidelines that might help you get there:
- Enjoy. What you will need to do is develop a deep and authentic passion for your field. Learn to love it and be explicit about why you love it..
- Be curious. Ask why at everything you see, read, or hear. Go out and discover. Grab every chance to meet inspiring people and learn from them.
- Be critical. Don’t believe everything the books, or your teachers, or the succesful business cases tell you. Challenge. Be difficult. But always try to come up with better solutions or suggestions for imrovement.
- Value design. Maybe you don’t need to be a great designer to be a great design manager. But certainly you need to understand, and I mean really dig, designand its value to organizations and society.
- Read. Literature will give you a solid foundation to work from. Theory is the launching platform, practice is the rocket. We’re in a field where it’s fun to read!
- Acquire experience. Try to get a job -any job- during your studies that is somewhat related to the field you’re studying and start putting things to practice. Expiriment. Try out if your ideas work. And then work on them.
- Network. The design management community is truly international. Get to know authors, bloggers, practitioners, students and teachers and share your views. In a world as fresh and young as design management, there’s really no point in going at it alone and competing with your peers.
- Preach. Design Management is not easy to understand. Learn to explain what you do, give lectures, gather illustrative case studies. It will help you learn to pitch projects, and it will help the profession.
- Specialise. Design Management is a broad field. Find out what triggers you most, and look for opportunities to learn more in that area. I chose Brand Driven Innovation. But anything that makes your heart beat faster is great.
- Respect. The companies you will work for will do many things wrong in your eyes. A critical attitude seems to be part of the DNA of design managers. But these same companies also put bread on the table of many many people. Respect them, and ask yourself what makes them do the things they do. Then help them become even better.
oh, and there’s an eleventh guideline: don’t listen to me, create your own ten rules 
(this post was conceived flying from Zurich to Amsterdam after a week of teaching Design Management at HSLU Lucerne to a great bunch of 3rd year Design Management bachelors with Ralf Beuker. Boy did we have a great week 
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Also see Ralf’s insightful posting on some of the stuff we did that week.
Tags: desig nmanagement, HSLU, lucerne, luzern, ralf beuker, studying design management, teaching design management, ten rules
Erik, great insights. Especially number 9 (Specialise). I’d also add to number 7 (Network) that students should be networking well outside the design management field and into networks from lots of industries and add to number 8 (Preach) that students should experiment with public expression such as blogs and articles.