Alternatively, the results may suggest ways in which industry and designers could better adapt their work to these patterns.Quality management is another important topic. Widely used quality models make no explicit mention of design. Working with the European Foundation for Quality Management, Dr Dumas hopes to insinuate the idea of design into future standards for quality management. The trick is to make sure that design is mentioned in the standards that matter, says Dr Dumas, not that separate design standards be published but ignored.The Design Council is also looking at benchmarking the design process. This is partly a matter of applying practices well understood in other areas of business, but it is also a matter of recognising where design differs from other business activities. In general, says Dr Dumas, “work is done downstream of a fixed specification because you need something to benchmark against.

But design happens mostly upstream.” There are, therefore, no agreed performance measures to describe the generation or subsequent shaping and development of creative ideas, for example.In a pilot study, Nick Oliver, at the Judge Institute of Management Studies in Cambridge, looked at productivity, quality, and timing in four local electronics companies. Design quality was assessed by a number of means, including reports of product failure from consumers, the number of specification changes made once production had started, and the volume of scrap generated in the factory. “If you get a high rate of scrap, you probably have a bad design,” says Dr Oliver.Other research aims directly to benefit the design community and education. There is alarming scope for misunderstanding between these groups and the industrial world.

This is down to self-perceptions as much as one group’s view of the other.”There is a management expectation that designers have the creativity sucked out of them by time spent on the factory floor,” says Dr Dumas. “What does that say about management attitudes?” Clearly, nothing good. If businesses suffer such low self-esteem, how can they expect to enthuse designers?For their part businesses often criticise the jargon of design research. “The stuff that comes out of academia doesn’t have much to do with the everyday work of design managers, which is a world away from some of these highfalutin theories,” says David Mercer, the head of design at BT.