Did some more poking around on the term “Silent Design.” Turns out the phrase comes from research conducted in the late 1980s by British researchers Peter Gorb and Angela Dumas. (The original paper is available through Science Direct). The objectives of this research was to identify the understanding of design, resource and support of design, and the operational nature of design management in UK organizations. They were less interested in identifying best practices in design management—they wanted to uncover the practice as generally applied. During the course of the first year of research, they identified what they call “Silent Design.” I have not yet located further updates to this research.

They describe Silent Design like this:

It can be argued that a great deal of design activity goes on in organizations which is not called design. It is carried out by individuals who are not called designers and who would not consider themselves to be designers. We have called this ’silent design’. p.152

I haven’t thought through this deeply yet, but one thing that strikes me is that, despite the introduction of the Internet which has probably more deeply ingrained and distributed Silent Designers throughout organizations, we face many of the same challenges faced in the pre-Internet 1980s.