Dirk Baecker: Organisation als System. This title doesn’t sound like holiday literature, does it? I read it over a long weekend holiday in Arba Minch, a small town near the border between Ethiopia and Kenya, which is a rather unlikely place to have an enlightening encounter with a disciple of the philosopher Niklas Luhmann. I read it for a lack of alternatives, since there was no other book available. Without regrets. This book opened my eyes for an extended understanding of design thinking.
After a few semesters in architecture school I became bored of the dance that is made around that mythical, magical process of design. Most design professors could not explain more than “its something between your eye, your mind and your pen”, or “you better have a bottle of red wine under the table”, or “if you work harder it will come”. In the end, it is not so difficult. Design is a process of filling a gap, or, more precisely, a process of understanding the gap while filling it. Something that one can learn, that can be made explicit, like other crafts. Why could it not be explained better? And taught more directly?
Dirk Baecker’s book shows a way out of this dilemma. In his essay “Über das Handwerk des Unternehmers”, a speech held at the launch of the study programme on entrepreneurship at the private university of Witten-Herdecke, he proposes to differentiate between managers and entrepreneurs and educate both in their own way. Managers work with algorithmic operations based on rationality, while entrepreneurs work with heuristic thought processes and use their intelligence, because their task is to detect and fill a (market) gap. Sounds familiar…
Building further on this thought, an education for entrepreneurs, would therefore not be much different from the one for designers. What if we would strip the design classes from formal operations and start teaching design for non-designers?