Hail to the auteur? Why 'aesthetic management' cannot save design management
Karl Palmås, Otto von Busch · Chalmers Research (Chalmers University of Technology) · 2008
This paper reviews how scholars within "aesthetic managment" have critiqued mainstream, marketing-led Design Management.The text argues that while this approach does have its merits, it ultimately fails to create the kind of creative economy that it purports to endorse.Rather, by stressing the unique and transcendent creative powers of the auteur, it simply invents yet another authority that yields economic hierarchies.The authors thus propose that the discipline of Design Management ought to follow recent developments within business and the arts, in which innovation and creativity is described in ways that do away with traditional notions of authorship.Doing so would enable the discipline to explore how non-hierarchical, "meshworked" economies can be created around the practices of individual designers.