Making way for design thinking in the public sector: a taxonomy of strategies

Public organizations are increasingly turning to design thinking to address wicked societal issues, enhance innovation, and improve services. However, in general, public organizations do not provide the most receptive context for design thinking. To be applied effectively, design thinking requires sufficient tolerance for uncertainty,...

Educating resilient and well designers

In this paper, we explore how resilience and wellbeing can integrate into, and improve design pedagogy. We establish 10 principles for designer resilience from workshops with students, educators and design practitioners. Each principle offers a platform to develop subsequent learning activities that remedy hollow didactic statements observed...

IDOLS* Langetermijneffecten: Sociale innovatie met de culturele en creatieve sector : Een onderzoek naar de langetermijneffecten van het IDOLS*-programma

Binnen het IDOLS*-programma werd op een vernieuwende en creatieve manier gewerkt aan maatschappelijke vraagstukken. Dit gebeurde in consortia van probleemhouders<br/>uit verschillende sectoren en opdrachtnemers uit de culturele en creatieve sector. Het belangrijkste doel van het programma was het vergroten van het verdienvermogen van de...

A community-based learning program to improve wellbeing and design student success

While the Pandemic has increased awareness towards student wellbeing in higher education (HE), it also exacerbated existing challenges. Specifically, students pursuing their master graduation thesis often find themselves isolated and overwhelmed due to the individualistic nature of their project and the pressure to create a ‘masterpiece’. In...

Design, one piece of the puzzle: A conceptual and practical perspective on transdisciplinary design

Transdisciplinary research is claimed to be essential in tackling today’s complex societal challenges. Transdisciplinarity includes collaboration and integration across academic disciplines, non-academic ways of knowing, and the ‘real world’ of citizens, professionals and other stakeholders. Design can contribute to transdisciplinarity by...

A study on strategic activities to foster design practices in a local government organization

In recent years, governments have increasingly pursued innovation by embed-ding design into their organizations. One particularly common approach to em-bedding design in government organization is to establish public sector innova-tion labs. These labs are described as contributors and facilitators of innovation in policymaking processes;...

Service Designing for Human Relationships to Positively Enable Social Systemic Change

Service design is increasingly seen as a means to enable systemic change in complex contexts. The contexts in which services are co-produced—the social group, network, service organisation, or ecosystem—can be considered complex social systems. A characteristic of complex social systems is that new system behaviour emerges through a mechanism...

Beyond Good Intentions: Towards a Power Literacy Framework for Service Designers

Moving into the social and public sector, service design is becoming both more complex and more participatory. This is reflected in the greater diversity and interrelatedness of stakeholders and the wicked problems being addressed. However, although many service designers working in the social and public domains bring into their design...

A Co-evolutionary, Transdisciplinary Approach to Innovation in Complex Contexts: Improving University Well-Being, a Case Study

Complex societal challenges cannot be resolved with quick fixes, nor can they be successfully addressed from disciplinary or institutional silos. In this article we propose an innovative approach to tackling contemporary societal challenges based on complexity theory and transdisciplinarity. The lens of complexity reveals that such challenges...

A Partnership Outcome Spaces framework for purposeful student–staff partnerships

The benefits of student–staff partnerships are widely reported in the Students-as-Partners literature. It is envisaged that partnership initiatives can have a transformative effect on institutional cultures, however, how this transformation might be achieved is less clear. Building on transdisciplinary and systems change perspectives, we...

An adaptive and strategic human-centred design approach to shaping pandemic design education that promotes wellbeing

Positive student wellbeing is intrinsically connected to positive learning outcomes. Students learn more when they feel well, and the way we shape education influences the way students feel. The COVID-19 crisis has forced us to radically change our design education and is having a large impact on student wellbeing and learning. While some...

Systemic Design Principles in Social Innovation: A Study of Expert Practices and Design Rationales

In recent decades, design has expanded from a practice aimed at designing things to one that helps to address complex societal challenges. In this context, a field of practice called systemic design has emerged, which combines elements of systems thinking with elements of design. We use a case study approach to investigate how expert...

Stepping in and Stepping out: Enabling Creative Third Spaces Through Transdisciplinary Partnerships

This article explores how transformative higher education approaches can be fostered through an integration of the concepts of third space, Students as Partners (SaP), and<br/>transdisciplinarity in practical contexts. We describe a collaborative enquiry that engaged staff and students in a reflexive dialogue centred on the concepts of mutual<br...

Track 5.b Introduction: Strengthening the Design Capabilities of Professional Organisations in a Complex World

In Hong Kong of the year 2017, a new academic community convened to attend to pressing issues regarding design as source of innovation. The inaugural Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference (nee Design Management Academy) attended to a sense of urgency regarding the adoption of design capabilities within organisations as source of...

Improving wellbeing in universities: a transdisciplinary systems change approach

In order for universities to flourish, we need to ensure that their staff and students are well mentally, physically and socially. Improving wellbeing is an open, systemic and complex challenge, because it contains many interrelated and dynamic problems and concerns. Such challenges cannot be ‘solved’ by using traditional and reductionist...

Understanding the current practice of design in government: limitations and opportunities

Design is today suggested as an alternative way of working in government contexts. Manydeveloped nations are trying to embed design in their public organizations. Yet recent<br/>studies have shown that design is not easily permeating into everyday practice of public organizations. This research therefore aims to understand what the current...