When I was a design student, the common perception was that if you were really talented you might get a job with a design consultancy. The rest of us, if we even got a job, would have to settle for an in-house position working for a manufacturer; dreaming of the better pay, more attractive staff, and glamour of being a “design consultant.”
“Consultant Envy” may have been true 20 years ago, but it should hardly be the case today. The Design narrative has progressed, and now many of the most innovative, customer-centric and sustainable organizations treat design as a strategic asset and have design thinking, if not designers, at the heart of their businesses
Design consultancies are still around, and many do excellent work, but as other “business critical” consultancies have ballooned to huge sizes (e.g. Accenture at 180,000 employees and Omnicom at 63,000), the largest industrial design consultancies top out at around 600 people. This inability to scale implies a deep, perhaps existential flaw within the design consultancy proposition.
