Design Thinking: A Boon for Business Majors

For many undergraduate students, pursuing a major in business or marketing can be a practical choice. The broad applications of these types of majors lend themselves to a wide array of careers. Unfortunately, this path may not always lead students to jobs that are particularly stimulating or impactful, especially for those seeking a more challenging and fulfilling career. With critical thinkers being in such high demand, liberal arts institutions like Furman University are beginning to offer design courses that cultivate the creative abilities of their students. Not only do these courses properly stimulate students, they also provide them with a competitive edge in the market as primed “design thinkers.”

Michael Higgins at Forbes Magazine defines design thinking as “a methodology that delves deep into customer needs to approach problems from a human perspective. Pain points are often complex, and design thinking draws insight from diverse sources and collaborative thinking.”

Within Furman University’s Master of Arts in Strategic Design program, post-graduate students are immersed in an atmosphere that champions this methodology through rigorous projects.  These projects familiarizes them, not only with design principles, but with how to be empathetic problem solvers and communicators.  Recently, we were joined by two graduates of the program hailing from business backgrounds who discussed their experiences in the program and why they feel in was the right choice for their careers.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT PROGRAM

For Furman alumna and business major Melanie Rankin, succeeding both in class and on the soccer field were two top priorities as an undergraduate. “The business program was a lot of what I focused on during my senior spring semester,” she claims. “I had some free electives, and I decided to take an advertising design class. That was my first and only experience in the Art Department at Furman.”

Through this design class, Melanie discovered that her creative streak was just as wide as her competitive one. After graduating with only one design class under her belt, she decided to pursue a career in fashion, working for Nicole Miller in Philadelphia, PA before returning to enroll in the master’s program in Strategic Design.

Similarly, University of Alabama Business graduate Olu Ogunbi came to the decision to enroll in the program after trying his hand at various marketing associate roles, retail, and even some work overseas before finally deciding to go back to school.

“I really wanted to go into something that was more creative.” Olu says “I always saw myself as a creative, but never understood what it meant as a career.”

Both Melanie and Olu came from business backgrounds and had spent some time in the workforce; however, each knew they needed a master’s degree to get to the next level of their career. Their only stipulation was that they wanted something that would fit with both their career and personal goals.

“The biggest reason I even chose the program was because it integrates design, business, and communication,” claims Melanie.  “Long story short, I had to test a bunch of different things before I could fully commit to this program, but I’m obviously very happy that I did in the end.”

LEARNING THE TOOLKIT

The decision to pursue a career in design can be daunting for those with no artistic experience or background, but with the support structures provided by Furman’s graduate program, an initial lack of knowledge can be greatly mitigated for students.

“For me, it was best to learn the programs and the principles of design because I didn’t have that background coming into it,” says Melanie.  “I definitely thought that I was going to play a lot of catch-up and spend a lot of extra hours learning things, but the good part about our cohort is that it became very easy. If I didn’t know something, or some function in one of the design programs, I can easily reach out to another classmate and say, ‘Okay, how do you do this specific thing’ and they’d be happy to teach me.”

“I do draw, but never had any experience in Photoshop or InDesign or anything like that,” says Olu. “The most important thing is just being willing to ask for help and being able and willing to learn and to understand the programs. It really does take humility to understand that you can’t just do it by yourself. You can’t just go about learning tools and trying to figure it out on your own. You really have to reach out for help.”

Reflecting on his time in the program, Olu states that ultimately having a broader understanding of the toolkit has helped him transform his career. “I’ve come a long way,” he said. “It’s pretty much a miracle of how far I’ve progressed. I think understanding the tools has allowed me to be more confident in myself in being able to execute projects.”

ESTABLISHING AN EMPATHETIC PERSPECTIVE

At the core of true business success lies the act of meeting the needs of others. So too with design thinking. The first stage in the process is being able to effectively empathize with your audience.

“Empathy helps problem-solvers understand the problem from the end user viewpoint,” writes Higgins.  “This means putting human needs before everything else. Your ideas will be successful only if they answer a real need or want. That’s what empathy means in an ideation setting.”

“This program allowed me to have more empathy when it comes to design work and to understand where creatives are coming from,” says Olu. “Coming from a business background, you understand more of the statistics and the hard facts and data, but you don’t understand the conceptual side of things, as far as the creative process and design thinking. Being able to have that understanding in this program has allowed me to better understand the process when it comes to creative work.”

DEVELOPING MULTI-FACETED PROBLEM SOLVERS

Jeanne Liedtka writes in the Harvard Business Review that “design thinking has the potential to do for innovation exactly what Total Quality Management (TQM) did for manufacturing: unleash people’s full creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes.”

For both Melanie and Olu, they discovered that their backgrounds in the world of business helped give them a unique perspective and approach to their design work while in the program.

“I think I approached projects very differently than my classmates who had a traditional art or design background,” says Melanie. “I come into projects with a very logical mindset of: How is this (product) going to look in the real world or how is it going to function? I reversed the typical mindset of how design is taught. I had to get out of my head and just be creative and throw any ideas out there, so that was a learning curve for me.”

PUSHING BOUNDARIES THROUGH IDEATION

Ideation is one of the keystones of the Furman master’s program. It facilitates this through rigorous classwork that pushes the boundaries of what the students know, how they communicate with others, and what their abilities are.

“The program does a really good job with the types of projects that you work on through the different terms,” Melanie says. “You work on projects that are theoretical, where the whole purpose of it is to provoke thought or to provoke a conversation. The spectrum of projects, and the way you think about those projects is also super broad. That is one of the big reasons why I wanted to choose this program, specifically, because I didn’t want to be narrowed into one lane going out into the world.”

As many who have worked in corporate America would admit, from a business perspective, the most efficient solution is often the most championed.

“Defining problems in obvious, conventional ways, not surprisingly, often leads to obvious, conventional solutions,” claims Liedtka. “Asking a more interesting question can help teams discover more-original ideas.”

The Master’s in Strategic Design embraces teaching things a little differently. For Melanie, the program pushed her to discover more than just the most efficient or expedient solution to a problem.

Melanie says “It pushes you to think, Okay, I’ve created three solutions to this problem. But let’s not stop there. Let’s create ten solutions, and then we’ll whittle down to what we think is the best, pushing to that extra level. Not being satisfied with the first obvious solution, but allowing ourselves to be super creative in multiple solutions. I think that’s one of the biggest influences that I will take with me in my current work.”

“At the end of the idea generation process, innovators will have a portfolio of well-thought-through, though possibly quite different ideas,” asserts Liedtka. “The assumptions underlying them will have been carefully vetted, and the conditions necessary for their success will be achievable. The ideas will also have the support of committed teams, who will be prepared to take on the responsibility of bringing them to market.”

So too, for Olu and Melanie, the experiences gained through the Master of Arts in Strategic Design supplement their professional portfolios and work experiences.  As Strategic Design graduates, they have now widened the scope of what’s possible for them in the career paths that exist between corporate business and design.

Where are they now?

As of the most recent update to this article,  Melanie Rankin has been ranked by Graphic Design USA as one of the “Top Young Designers to Watch” in 2020. She is currently employed as an Art Director for Pavone Marketing, a firm located in Philadelphia, PA. Olu Ogunbi is currently employed as an Account Coordinator at Adidas, North America.