Leadership is easy to recognize but hard to define. The shape of leadership, as it develops in the design industry, is at once familiar and fresh. Given that “design is way less mature than other corporate functions, and its practice and impact suffer because of its lack of sophistication,” it is crucial for designers, managers, and future leaders to understand how design leadership forms (Merholz & Skinner vii). So I set out to research how to define, identify, and replicate design leadership.
At the onset, the goal of this research effort was to (1) define design leadership distinctly versus develop a general definition of “leadership”, (2) provide tangible ways for individuals to become design leaders, and (3) evaluate the maturity of leadership in the design field. In an effort to grasp how leadership has evolved in the context of a design organization or team, I tried to trace themes that emerge in traditional resources (standard reference books, blog posts, white papers, etc) on the subject of leadership and design organizations. I also wanted to talk to real people; designers, leaders, writers. So I interviewed five design leaders and paired the insights from those interviews with the written work done by other researchers and practitioners in the field. I refer to the design leaders I interviewed numerically for the sake of anonymity (e.g. Design Leader One, Design Leader Two…
