ABSTRACT
Nowadays, design is sharing an increasingly close relationship with business activities, which requires outstanding business managers to be capable of design thinking and designers to have business and management ideas. Consequently, it is particularly important for design students to develop business and management skills. Nonetheless, there has been a tendency of emphasizing on design practices and ignoring related theories in China’s design education field. The economic, social and cultural elements in design courses are not being paid enough attention to, while the cultivation of students’ managerial ability, operational ability, leadership and necessary knowledge of laws are not properly valued and popularized. Designers nurtured under current education pattern work as highly-skilled product-development professionals, rather than managers of development projects. Therefore, it is of great importance to educate design students with business and management knowledge.
