Design Intervention Patterns in Complex Design Challenges

Abstract

The mobility sector increasingly operates under conditions characterized by persistent uncertainty, rapid technological change, and complex stakeholder dynamics, often described as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) contexts. Building on prior work that examined design process trajectories in airport ecosystem cases, we introduce Dynamic Stability framework as a theoretical lens to interpret how design teams balance exploration and coherence in open-ended future mobility design project contexts. This paper examines how novice design teams navigate these complex challenges through a longitudinal analysis of 80 student projects (61 coded) from four annual offerings (2021–2025) of a project-based future mobility design course at a major research university in the Netherlands. Our longitudinal analysis reveals recurring design intervention patterns of reframing, integration of multi stakeholder views, and situational adoption of transition heuristics, and the cross-tabulation of innovation level (project; service; and system) and intervention type (Redesign; Reframe; Repurpose; and Reimagine). System-level outcomes appear exclusively in multimodal and emerging domains. Also, our research reveals that product outcomes are predominantly reached via Redesign, Service outcomes via Reframe, and System outcomes exclusively via Reframe or Reimagine. Our findings offer implications for design pedagogy, curriculum innovation, and dynamic stability theory and framework building in complex and extreme system designs.