Changing design: designing change

We see programs dedicated to developing the intelligence, mindset, skills, and values for collaborative working, systems thinking, and transformation leadership in design research and education. They are characterized by their interdisciplinary nature and largely influenced by the current dominating emphasis on global challenges, such as climate change, health, racial equity, and social inequalities. The emerging areas of design include design neurocognition, design-led entrepreneurship, enterprise design thinking, legal design, nature-centric design, social design, transition design, and transdisciplinary design. Among the shift, there is also design for business, design for change, design for behaviour change, design for health, and design for sustainability.

The nature and subject of change are evident in many new and traditional areas of design and design research writings. This issue’s papers, PhD reports, and exhibition reviews – the authors and institutions supporting them – are no exception. They give insight into the spirit of design and creatively navigating an uncertain universe to improve life and living.

‘Design is…corrupting’ by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås is the second in a new series of provocations intended to enrich the imagination by agitating. We are crafting a safe space to offer controversial writings that indirectly support creativity. It is not something we have done before as a journal. Still, we recognize it as a way of stimulating reflection as much as calling attention to a potentially divisive viewpoint that can also help catch assumptions or biases. Von Busch and Palmås argue that the contemporary design debate can do with a ‘healthy dose of political realism’ as well-intentioned ideas are wildly removed from political realities and contexts. This needs to change, and design needs to become more realistic than idealistic in its endeavours. What are your experiences and viewpoints? Let us know.

The challenge of applying design in the public sector, its diversity, management, and citizen engagement needs are called in for close inspection in ‘Design types in diversified city administration: The case city of Helsinki’. Six researchers from Aalto University in Finland, Sampsa Hyysalo, Kaisa Savolainen, Antti Pirinen, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Päivi Hietanen, and Meri Virta offer an articulate up-to-date exploration of design and what it is. They discuss how public sector administration understands, misunderstands, and uses it. Six broad clusters of design are presented – design in the built environment; design in the organization’s development; design know-how and training; design in participation and collaborative work; and design in strategy and branding work – with 23 different design activities. This solid case study will interest those following how design is changing and how it is used to facilitate change in organizations and cities.

Are legal design and design thinking conceptually comparable as human-centred approaches to innovation? Sunghoon Chung and Jieun Kim at Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea explore this in ‘Systematic literature review of Legal Design: Concepts, Processes, and Methods’. Their discussion brings visual thinking, legal design, and design thinking together to understand the inter-relations and where there is a strategic aspect to legal design. It is a welcomed and unusual frame of investigation offering insight into how design is changing as a process and a subject.

‘Wild design and its activism in everyday urban life’ takes ‘wild design’ as an unbiased design-oriented umbrella term to portray do-it-yourself (DIY) activities in China. Authored by Yaxi Liu, based at the National Museum of China in Beijing, the paper asks how wild design praxis works with time and space and how wild design agencies negotiate with the larger-scale infrastructural system. It explores migration, activism, monopoly, and alternative infrastructural systems, bringing a welcomed focus to modern-day paradoxes.

The next paper contributes to the growing interest in design entrepreneurship. It looks at the design entrepreneur’s ability to use several approaches concurrently or successively to strategy since businesses can simultaneously be involved in multiple strategic projects. ‘Enacting Individual Ambidexterity in Design Entrepreneurship’ by Pınar Kaygan (University of Southern Denmark), S. Nazlı Wasti (Middle East Technical University, Turkey) and İrem Dilek Alptekin (University of Economics and Technology, Turkey) critically position design entrepreneurship as self-employment which is often a large percentage of a country’s creative design industry. They examine designers as entrepreneurs and identify three forms of ambidexterity – temporal, structural, and task-based. Investigating the creative management of the tension between exploration and exploitation activities in businesses, the paper will be of practical value to aspiring design entrepreneurs and design educators worldwide. It articulates a deep understanding of the dualling tensions in creating and sustaining a design business.

The relationship between design and innovation is enduring with the options of incremental and radical routes. Jiang Xu, Han Lu, and Jingyu Xu at the College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, Shanghai, in China, author the next paper, ‘Defining a Product Characteristic Framework of Excellence for Meaning-Driven Radical Innovation’. They explore innovative mechanical products by creating a product characteristic framework for meaning-driven radical innovation. A descriptive, theoretical framework explanation is offered, and the potential for use as an evaluation and innovation prediction tool for future product design is given in the conclusion.

Geomart-ut7 is an exhibition by artist Selçuk Artut that was showcased in İstanbul. Dr. Esra Bici Nasır at the Izmir University of Economics in Turkey reviews the exhibition, discussing Islamic art, the animated geometrical patterns, and the influence of Artut’s work on generating innovative thinking. It offers an intricate and sensitive discussion of the relationship between design and culture, the exhibition curation, the coding in Artut’s visual practice, and the issues of indifference, bias, and heritage.

The next two of three PhD Reports in this issue stay with the theme of how design can help innovate. The first looks at how design can help improve healthcare, social care, and well-being across various products, services, and systems. ‘The role of interior design in promoting a sense of home in people with dementia living in care facilities’ by Jing Chen at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy.

The second PhD Report focuses on family firms, strategies for innovation, and emerging markets. It concerns ‘How family affects dynamic innovation capabilities in a design-intensive industry’ by Selin Gülden at the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at the İzmir University of Economics in Turkey.

Dongfang Yang, at the Politecnico di Milano Milan, Italy, is closing this issue. Yang studies design for sustainable furniture, shares the preliminary stage of doctoral research, and gives an articulate overview of the anticipated full study, ‘Design for environmentally sustainable furniture systems – the knowledge and know-how of furniture Life Cycle Design and furniture Sustainable Product-Service System Design’.