Organization Design and the Design Discipline

This chapter covers with broad brushstrokes the background in two fields of knowledge: organization design and design theory as applicable to organization design. In a nutshell, the field of organization design has been dominated by the contingency approach, a trend that treats organization design as being nothing more than structure and division of labour, with people not considered as part of the problem. Organization designs are “things” whose operation can be manipulated by predetermined rules. Over the years, there have been many voices against this, the most notable being that of Karl Weick, with the suggestion that organization design is all about improvisation. Building on that scholar’s ideas, the notion of organizational form/design shifts from something monolithic and imposed from the outside, to a more endogenous, generative, socially constructed, holistic, virtual and circular view of the organization, not directly dependent upon environmental forces, but with an in-built capacity to initiate changes in the environment. The second part of the chapter explores key writings in design theory, with a focus on human-centred design, as a school of thought that opposes design as problem-solving, a trend originally launched by the writings of Simon (The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996). Human-centred design, strongly influenced by the writings of Krippendorff (The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 2006), defines design as the creation of meaning and places humanism and ethics at the centre of its concerns.