Perspectives on Management of Product Development and the Role of Designers: How Design Processes Redesign Designers

The design processes and the role of designers in the concept development and launch phase of three high-end design chairs are analyzed as an outcome of fragile, changing, non-linear and dynamic network processes. Seven different views on how to understand design and design management are presented and distilled into five analytical perspectives on the management of design, and one of these is used for the empirical analysis. The analysis of the three chairs demonstrates how multiple human and non-human actors interact and in the processes not only produce the final proposed design, but how the design and the role of the actors mutates through these translation processes. The analysis shows how the final design is a bricolage where the traditional role of the designer becomes to be one among many human and non-human actors in a network that at one point in time is declared to be "the design". The designer is during the process her/himself re-designed through the need for being able to adapt to other actors in the network.