DESIGN THINKING IN PARSONS

Traditional management and business–related programs are highly "synthetic" in nature and transactional in perspective, merely focused on problem-descriptive and contingency-analytical skills. In contrast, students in Parsons' MS S&DM will emerge with far more advanced attributes, competencies, and capabilities. They will develop their existing generative attributes and acquire new ones in order to initiate and lead change. Students will develop a broader range of competencies that leverage design thinking and support a deeper understanding of the issues affecting an evolving economy than they would in a traditional design program that focuses on designing objects. Design thinking, in combination with a strategic, sustainable, future-oriented business and economic perspective, will allow them to experiment with organizational contexts, new collaborative structures, and innovative project settings. They will initiate, implement, and participate in real-life projects with partners in creative industries, design consultancies, and other organizations.

Academically, we provide a programmatic path by starting at the economic level, providing a macro vision of future value creation and consumption systems. We then proceed to the firm level by investigating the parameters, conditions, and limitations of new business models. These in turn require new forms of collaboration, co-creation, and co-determination in high-powered creative groups and teams. At the individual level, we focus on generating the leadership effect and innovation capacity. We integrate these with a fundamentally challenging ethical context of the experience economy with its dimensions of social value, private means, intellectual contributions and property, and the imperatives of sustainability, ecological accountability, and business-environmental responsibility. And we finally put it together in our capstone course, New Design Firms, identifying the potential, the competitive advantage, and the fundamental imperative of design-centric strategy for managers, entrepreneurs, innovators, policymakers, and business catalysts.

We support the content of new learning with immediate and real-life application through studio courses with external partner engagement and with tangible deliverables.