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The Impact of Design Management Thinking on Danish Design and Design Education

The research project is a collaboration between the Royal Danish Academy and the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), aimed at examining the influence of design management thinking on Danish design and design education from the late 1970s to the present day. The project is based on the assumption that design management thinking, with its focus on placing design competencies at the core of businesses and society, has played a crucial role in Danish design policy, public organizational development, and design education. It has also sparked contentious debates about the role of designers and the impact of design competencies on business and societal development.

This project establishes design management thinking as a new dimension of Danish design history by investigating its influence on Danish design with reference to a leading industrial body (the Danish Design Centre), a leading public company (DSB, the Danish national rail company) and tertiary artistic design education (Design School Kolding and Royal Danish Academy - Design). 

The project is anchored in the tradition of design studies with a view to current debates on the designer’s professional roles and the future benefit of design competences for business, industry, the public sector and society. The project is approached as a ‘history of textual design discourse’, as the primary subject field is constituted by written and oral texts. The documentation aims to provide a ‘history of design ideas’ based on a combination of historical source studies and qualitative interviews framed by studies in design management and design thinking.