Possible ways of engaging the depths of managerial, strategic, and entrepreneurial conditions of design

Berlin, 20.01.2025

The “iceberg” format (often circulated online as an iceberg chart) is a meme-based mapping device that arranges knowledge from what is most visible and commonly recognized at the top to what is less visible, more structural, or more specialized “below the surface.” Rather than presenting a field as a linear list, it visualizes a layered depth model—highlighting not only what is readily legible in everyday discourse, but also what tends to remain implicit or backgrounded.

The Design Management Iceberg proposes such a layered cartography of design management as a multi-stranded discipline. Upper layers gather more familiar and practice-near domains—canonical management, organizational, and branding repertoires, along with operational steering, communication logics, and tool-based approaches. Mid-level layers track contemporary expansions such as design strategy, design leadership, and design entrepreneurship, where design is positioned as a strategic and organizational capacity rather than a downstream service function. Deeper layers foreground the conditions and critiques that shape the field: analyses of power and dispositifs, media and technological infrastructures, labor and value production, and wider political-economic formations—alongside debates on agency, complexity, platformization, automation, and processes of subjectivation. At the lowest strata, the chart points to longer prehistories and genealogies (e.g., writing and inscription practices, bookkeeping, mathematics/statistics, cartography, oikonomia, and figures such as homo faber) to emphasize that design management does not emerge ex nihilo, but is entangled with long-standing traditions of ordering, coordinating, and governing.

The directional indicators suggest a general movement from affirmational, instrumental applications toward increased reflexivity and complexity: as one moves downward, critical interpretation and structural analysis intensify, while simplistic ideals of planning, control, and managerial “solutionism” become less tenable—at the same time, questions of agency become more pronounced.

Please note that this diagram is explicitly a working document: a provisional research and teaching map intended to support orientation and discussion. It cannot be comprehensive, nor does it claim to represent the full disciplinary positioning, global history, or conceptual diversity of design management. Instead, it offers a curated selection of references as a basis for iterating, expanding, rearranging, and contesting the field’s conceptual architecture.

Download the Design Management Iceberg (german)

Text: Konstantin Haensch