Design Management Journal最新文献

Design has transitioned from its traditional object-focus to an orientation toward human-centered design. With this shift, the complexity of design processes, products, deliverables, and artifacts has advanced to acknowledge and honor their impact on human activities and systems across the planet. As design practice has evolved, designers have searched beyond their field for tools, theoretical frameworks, and approaches developed by practitioners from other disciplines that allow for a deeper understanding of the environments and networks in which human and non-human actors engage. Many designers, including design managers, have adopted anthropology's long-standing tradition of balancing systems-level, holistic research with place-based and deeply contextual inquiry. Over time numerous. sub-fields within design have emerged to address changing conditions, such as the increasingly strategic role of design within organizations. Design Management (DM) “encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success” (Design Management Institute, 2022). Over time DM has embraced transdisciplinarity. It is a prime example and leader in this trend.

This paper examines the confluence of theory and methods across the disciplines, specifically Design and Anthropology. Both fields are continuously adapting to accelerating and unpredictable conditions in systems that span industry sectors, economies, socio-cultural groups, and physical and virtual geographies. It is not surprising there is an increasing confluence and, at the same time, tension and defensiveness in an effort to remain “pure”. However, individuals from both fields have found ways of mixing, integrating, experimenting, and evolving theory and new forms of practice. We will draw on specific, an original transdisciplinary project from practice that will elucidate this tension as well as emerging opportunities. We will argue the weaving of the two fields offers an opportunity to more intentionally put this knowledge into practice and uphold the shared ethical imperative to “do some good” while creating environments that sustain good work. The confluence of design and anthropology perspectives and methodologies and the emphasis on praxis, the practical application of theory in practice, enables practitioners to keep the social and ecological value of design at the center of their work. It is our hope and intention that this paper will inspire designers, educators, practitioners, and theorists to continue creative experimental collaboration in their own evolving practice.

The UN 2030 agenda for sustainable development acknowledges the role of creativity and cultural diversity in reconciling economic progress and social inclusion. Social innovation leads to social change and emanates from people's everyday interactions, reshaping the ways in which communities deal with social, economic, or environmental challenges. Co-production and community-led consultation have emerged as ways of working in partnership to inform and improve the delivery of public services. This positional paper is exploratory in how design led innovation can support the evaluation of community led projects which in turn lead to policy changes that endorse and support cultural and creative regeneration strategies. Adopting a Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology, workshops were facilitated to scope the requirements for the development of a pilot design-led toolkit for social innovation interventions underpinned by an evaluation model for impact. Findings from the research highlight opportunities for building capability and capacity in place-based knowledge exchange partnerships with community stakeholders to support participatory place-making in cities. The paper closes with recommendations for the adoption of design-led tools to embed creative practice in local and regional policymaking to help move from critique to creation, techniques that encourage deep collaboration and a process that enables ideas to grow in real-life settings.

This research explores innovation-readiness in the context of design-led innovation in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). It builds on work undertaken and published by the lead author's team in 2018. This reported on the team's rapid design-led intervention for supporting organisations to establish innovation readiness.

Since it first delivery, the approach has been deployed with over 60 separate enterprises across three different countries; UK, USA, and Armenia. It has evolved to be delivered through different modes; one-to-one, one-to-many, face-to-face and on-line. Further, it has been developed in such a way that postgraduate students, or ‘novice facilitators’, can take an active role in its delivery. Facilitation teams have invariably included at least one facilitator with a design background. Participants were enterprise founders or leaders.

In this study a mixed-methods approach is used, combining thematic analysis of participant surveys, co-reflection and semi-structured interviews with participants and facilitators. Findings suggest that this design-led approach delivers different benefits from typical business innovation readiness assessment and audit tools. It involves a form of co-creative, speculative knowledge venturing that supports enterprises in not only understanding their innovation readiness, but also in creating and mapping strategic innovation opportunities, thereby priming them to engage in design-led innovation practices. This co-creation of knowledge leads to both new knowledge about the innovation readiness of the enterprise and new innovation opportunities. It is revealed as a fundamental, catalytic aspect of the programme irrespective of mode, or location, of delivery.

This paper will be of interest to researchers and practitioners who are seeking to develop innovation support programmes working with SMEs and MSMEs.

Organizations are transitioning from a product mindset to services as their primary customer offering. Service organizations today have complex processes spread across physical and digital spaces involving several stakeholders. IT organizations help these organizations by building products and services and providing advisory to achieve their strategic objectives. IT organizations are hence well-positioned to introduce this shift towards a service mindset and encourage the adoption of service design. IT organizations need to first decide whether they want to proliferate service design. However, there is a predicament about how to approach this - should they start by designing the services for their customers first, or focus on their own organizational internal services? Once they decide it then next dilemma is about whether to follow top-down or bottom-up approach. We have utilized an ‘Inside-out’ approach for proliferating service design to address these dilemmas. The approach of ‘inside-out’, in essence, is about gradually proliferating a new process by experiencing its benefits within the organization first and then subsequently applying it to their customers outside the organization. In this paper we advocate the mix of top-down or bottom-up approach for the proliferation of service design.

Openly shared design knowledge and open-to-participate design processes present potential for democratising innovation through diffuse value creation networks that can diverge into different directions and design outcomes. This potential mostly concretises through the distributed production paradigm that localises production, closes material loops and empowers communities to meet their specific needs. This paper argues that there is a need for formalising truly alternative ways of doing open design-led businesses that can establish distributed value creation networks. In an attempt to enable and facilitate envisioning such alternatives, this paper presents a novel conceptualisation of stakeholders and framing of their ever-shifting roles and responsibilities in complex value creation networks suggested by distributed production through a systematic literature review of 131 journal articles at the intersection of open design, distributed production and business models. The analysis revealed two main categories of stakeholders namely value-creation-for-self and value-creation-for-others, with a total of six sub-categories presenting varying capacities to participate in networked value creation processes. The article concludes with a discussion on how this conceptualisation can enable envisioning novel, open design-led business models in terms of collaborative value creation, managing distributed value networks and a layered approach to design and value offerings.

Sustainability-related developments become a differentiating factor in development processes. An area with a strong focus on sustainability-related issues is packaging. In current packaging development processes, stakeholders focus on solving sustainability issues within their own boundaries. However, the complexities surrounding circular packaging can only be overcome by transdisciplinary collaboration. ‘Traditional’ collaboration shows to be incapable of overcoming packaging-specific complexities. Therefore, we launch Packalicious, a research initiative aiming to establish transdisciplinary innovation as a collaborative learning ecosystem.

In the initial research phase, a core stakeholder group developed the framework in which Packalicious operates. In the second (current) phase, the developed Packalicious framework is tested and improved. This design iteration builds on a transdisciplinary group-based case study, where real-life packaging challenges are tackled by diverse stakeholders.

In this paper, we define and measure the efficacy of collaborative learning within Packalicious by means of three innovation indicators. The first results indicate that the approach yields more diverse solutions, and a positive connotation with on-the-spot transdisciplinary collaboration. However, it also exposes the differences in discipline-related language and jargon. This paper contributes to academic insights by the establishment of a self-sustaining transdisciplinary learning ecosystem, and the ways in which this bridges gaps between disciplines and stakeholders.

Design and design management are increasingly called to respond to the world’s complex, dynamic problems. Yet, no standards or methodology exists to help designers understand, model, and design solutions for complex wicked problems. Program theory and social innovation promote the use of theory of change models to develop linear pathways of outcomes to show how a change initiative will have its desired effects. However, critics of these models accuse them of being simplistic and reductively linear. Systems thinking models use influence maps and causal loop diagrams to create maps of systems that show their behaviour in their full, dynamic complexity. However, these diagrams are sometimes complicated, overwhelming to read and therefore impractical. In this paper, we combine these tools with a novel technique from systemic design called “leverage analysis” to help identify crucial features of a complex problem and help designers develop practical theories of systemic change.

Despite the increasing attention Design Management has received from academics and practitioners a definitive conceptualization or a widely-agreed upon empirical measure of the construct does not yet exist. This paper proposes a new measurement of Design Management based on the informational elements captured in product design briefs. Exploratory Factor Analysis results suggest that Design Management is made up of eleven clusters: F1 Customer Insights; F2 Business Model; F3 Aesthetics; F4 Authenticity; F5 Symbolic/Experiential Value; F6 Functional Value; F7 Promotions/Distribution; F8 Sustainability; F9 Production/Development; F10 Project Management; F11 Risk/Safety. Our analysis describes how these factors show differing effects on measures of firm performance at the product project- and competitive advantage-levels (for example, F1, F3, and F9 are strongly and significantly positively related to both sets of measures while F4, F5, and F8 are more important to the competitive advantage of a firm than to any individual product offering). Our findings are organized and discussed using the Balanced Score Card for Design Management tool made up of (1) Customer Perspective (Design as differentiator); (2) Process perspective (Design as coordinator); (3) Learning and Innovation perspective (Design as transformer); and (4) Financial perspective (Design as good business).

Although there is a great need for Design, limited research is conducted on Design Management (DM) in the Middle East compared to Europe. One development in Cairo in the past decade is the increase of startups, generating a diversity of offerings. It is believed that the higher a company is on the DM Staircase, the more revenue it gets, among other benefits. Since Cairo startups are aiming to raise the Egyptian economy, this paper aims to define where Design lies by using the staircase as a measuring unit to plot startups against. Narrative interviews were conducted and processed to gain understanding from entrepreneurs and identify common terminologies used by startups. This paper addresses whether DM is adopted in Cairo but under different terminologies. It was found that existing Design terminology is frequently used in English which is not yet translated to Arabic, leading to miscommunication. Moreover, the paper concludes the plotting of startups against the DM Staircase to classify their Design integration. It was found that the level of DM involvement for the startups interviewed was at the lowest two levels. Therefore, this plotting paves the way for business consultants to help elevate startups onto the DM Staircase.