Spring Design Show

For the second consecutive year the Weatherhead School of Management hosted the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Spring Design Show, an event which features the work of over 100 Industrial, Interior, and Communication Design students. The Weatherhead School and the Cleveland Institute of Art realize that this show represents a unique opportunity to develop and exercise skills associated with identifying business opportunities and working in a multidisciplinary fashion. This year we announced a competition in which MBA students were encouraged to identify a particular CIA project that they thought had business potential and develop a brief prospectus to describe how that potential could be realized.

Seven teams submitted business plans that were reviewed by judges from both schools and cash prizes totaling $4,000 were awarded to the students of the first and second place proposals. The schools intend to continue this contest as a way to encourage students to explore and understand the context in which business ideas are developed.

Reshaping Boundaries Workshop

The Information Systems Department took on an important step toward strengthening the relationships between the Weatherhead School of Management and its University Circle neighbors September 24 - 25, by organizing a workshop called Reshaping Boundaries in Art, Design and Management. The workshop had 45 participants from 19 different institutions including The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Karamu House, among others. The workshop was designed to engage participants in a broader discussion of the challenges and opportunities that affect all of University Circle and the surrounding Cleveland cultural and arts institutions. The goal of the workshop was to explore design ideas in the context of re-designing and re-framing the role and impact of these institutions in the University Circle. The facilitators of the workshop, Lucy Kimbell of Saïd Business School in Oxford and Youngjin Yoo of Temple University in Philadelphia, challenged the participants to design better experiences for their stakeholders. The workshop involved a series of interactive group exercises that introduced participants to a new way of thinking about the stakeholders in their organizations. Exercises were quick, visual, and auditory — moving from 2 dimensional to 3 dimensional representations, and generated thoughtful conversations among the participants and relationships between many of the participating institutions.

Convergence: Managing + Designing

The Information Systems Department partnered with the Cleveland Institute of Art to host an intensive three-day international working conference entitled Convergence: Managing + Designing with plans in place for three follow-up workshops, a book of academic studies, and a set of curriculum and materials for teaching design skills to business students, a promising outcome for a conference in an emerging management field that is garnering a great deal of attention within and outside of academia.

More than seventy representatives of diverse areas of management and design gathered under the roof of Weatherhead’s Peter B. Lewis Building to map the intersections of their expertise. The convergence of management and design is a familiar principle to IS faculty who spearhead the initiative Manage by Designing, a signature theme threaded throughout the school’s graduate curriculum.

Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens

The central theme of the Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens conference was the potential contribution and role of a positive lens in the design of information and organizations. The conference brought together a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars from industry and academia who are interested in exploring "positive" approaches, such as Appreciative Inquiry, for designing organizations, information, technologies, or social action, which promote positive change and fosters betterment in human organizations and communities.