Seungho Park-Lee
Briefing at the pre-project phase in design consulting
How design consultants navigate through uncertainty while briefing and selling simultaneously
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In design consulting, briefing prior to project commission – i.e., the
process of communicating and negotiating a project's aim, scope,
deliverables and corresponding fee – is an essential first step for
designers to get a project commission and establish an initial
relationship with a potential client. Although briefing has long been of
interest to scholars and practitioners in design, there have been few
empirical studies on the real-life context of briefing at the
pre-project phase in design consulting, especially in such fields as
industrial design and service design.
The
aim of this dissertation is to understand the nature of briefing at the
pre-project phase in design consulting and its real-life conditions for
design consultants. Through three studies of an inductive nature, it
reveals how briefing is an embedded part of sales and procurement
processes in design consulting, which produces a discontinuity in
briefing subsequent to a project commission. Therefore, design
consultants are required to predict the full scope of the (potential)
project and to detail tasks in creating an offer for a potential client
even though the design process inherently involves uncertainties.
Briefing at the pre-project phase can be more challenging if clients
have little proficiency in using design and do not readily understand
the uncertainty and their role for effective collaboration. These
real-life contexts challenge the widely accepted notions of briefing as a
reflective and iterative dialogue in the context of design consulting
and thus call for guidelines for sensible and practical responses for
practitioners.
You can read the dissertation here