My move over to being “embedded” was not taken without reservations. I had concerns about the limitations of working continually on a single subject area; the difficulty of communicating the potential benefits of design to colleagues who did not think in the same terms; and also that I was alienating myself from working with other designers. I’m glad to say that these concerns proved to be unfounded.

It’s true, as you say, that this type of work makes design harder to explain. Although some of my time is spent doing traditional graphic design tasks, a substantial amount is given to strategic thinking and speculative projects. The benefit to the organisation is that to buy in this kind of work is difficult from an economic point of view and hard to justify because it will not, in most cases, provide tangible end products. I’m uncomfortable with the term “design-thinking” – it sounds suspiciously like marketing speak – but there is a massive benefit to any organisation to have a team that bring together many ways of thinking be that creative, business, journalistic, scientific, literary…

Having design capabilities in-house allows organisations to visualise and prototype ideas in a way that can make things ‘real’ quickly; it can fuel ongoing discussion and can help to involve the wider organisation in the design process. Embedding design also has the benefit of helping to remove the client/designer power relationship that is always evident when design service is bought in from outside consultancies. Some of my colleagues have spoken of the difficulty of working with external designers due to the language barrier but also because they feel they have to back down to the expert knowledge of the designer – when you work day-to-day alongside your ‘client’ it makes it much more difficult to hide behind a veil of professional expertise.

I attended this weeks RSA Thursdays lecture where Nabeel Hamdi spoke persuasively about the need for architects and designers to think of themselves as “enablers rather than providers” and I think this a crucial point when considering the role of embedded design. A designer working in-house has the potential to enable others to take more ownership over the design process which can lead to more flexible and resourceful organisations. Particularly in the third sector this could provide huge benefit.

In my mind the biggest challenge will be recruitment as I believe in-house design work is held in low regard amongst most of the design profession – although as you can probably tell I’m a recent convert.

I look forward to reading the transcript of what is a timely debate.

Other favourites include jeggings, webinar, diarise and trending.