Abstract:Design management has evolved from the simple view as the management of design projects and processes, to include more upstream responsibilities and skills, at the intersection of design and strategic management. Recent literature highlights the role of design in leading and shaping company strategy, conceiving new business models, and in driving organizational change and renewal. Yet existing tools and frameworks for assessing design management capabilities fall short in catching up with the transition that has been undergoing in the ways design is utilized and managed inside organizations. This paper presents a new Design Management Audit Framework that aims to fill the gaps in existing tools by incorporating new capabilities that are increasingly emphasized by the emerging design, design management and strategic management literature. The tool also seeks to provide an answer to the question: "What are the new capabilities to be integrated into design management practices of our future economies?"

Design education is in need of a wider restructuring to accommodate new developments and paradigmatic shifts brought forth by the information age, all of which capitalise a move towards complexity theory, systems science and digital technologies. The intention of this article is to approach one particular aspect of this need: that is, how basic design education can be reconsidered to establish the arguably broken link between the ‘learning by doing’ tradition of a Bauhaus‐oriented basic design education with the computational and parametric logic necessitated by contemporary design technologies. The authors present the overall outlines of a basic design course as offered in Beykent University Department of Industrial Design in Istanbul, Turkey. The programme consists of a series of exercises grouped in five modules and two ‘binders’ that are structured to link the fundamental notions and operations of design thinking covered in basic design courses of the first year with the analytical and computational‐reasoning competencies that are developed mostly in the later years of design education.

As Turkish brands seek to find a place on the global market, some are discovering design as a powerful tool for competitive advantage. This case study tells the story of VitrA Bath, which is claiming a hard‐won niche on the world market by positioning itself as a design‐led company.

Conflicting with heightened awareness about design's strategic role for businesses, research is lacking about methods and tools to guide designers and organizations in building strategic design management capabilities, as well as about the development of these capabilities in organizational contexts. This paper aims to provide important perspectives concerning these issues in two major ways. First, it presents the development of a new Design Management Audit Framework (DMAF) that aspires to identify and accommodate new capabilities and responsibilities that are necessary to support the changing and broadening context and roles of design. Then, the paper discusses the triggers, enablers and challenges in moving from design management to strategic design management practices in organizational contexts, based on the results of 3 in-depth case studies, which have utilized the new Design Management Audit Framework to carry out a comprehensive design management audit process inside these organizations.