Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.005
Peter A. Hall
{"title":"Review of Introduction to Design Psychology by Eleni Kalantidou","authors":"Peter A. Hall","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 553-556"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.004
Gijs van Leeuwen , Abhigyan Singh , Bregje F. van Eekelen , David Keyson
This article presents a novel approach—Ontological Future Making—that prioritizes transformative action. Rather than considering distant possibilities and consequences of futures, this approach engages with the negotiation of futures in the present. It is based on a review of existing work from the field of design anthropology. The article describes three steps of Ontological Future Making: to understand the future orientations of actors involved, engage with the immediate tensions that arise from their negotiation, and transform the ontological conditions that constrain future possibilities. We illustrate the approach with empirical data from a local energy transition project in Amsterdam Southeast. In this empirical account, we describe the future orientations of project partners and local residents and identify tensions related to extractive research and disciplinary differences. We describe the actions taken to address these tensions and describe our collaboration with residents to establish a local energy community. We characterize this initiative as transformative action as it served to enable shared futures for the project. We discuss the implications of these findings, arguing that future making should be more direct, political, and relational.
{"title":"Design Anthropology and Ontological Future Making: Transformative Action for the Emergence of Shared Futures","authors":"Gijs van Leeuwen , Abhigyan Singh , Bregje F. van Eekelen , David Keyson","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article presents a novel approach—Ontological Future Making—that prioritizes transformative action. Rather than considering distant possibilities and consequences of futures, this approach engages with the negotiation of futures in the present. It is based on a review of existing work from the field of design anthropology. The article describes three steps of Ontological Future Making: to understand the future orientations of actors involved, engage with the immediate tensions that arise from their negotiation, and transform the ontological conditions that constrain future possibilities. We illustrate the approach with empirical data from a local energy transition project in Amsterdam Southeast. In this empirical account, we describe the future orientations of project partners and local residents and identify tensions related to extractive research and disciplinary differences. We describe the actions taken to address these tensions and describe our collaboration with residents to establish a local energy community. We characterize this initiative as transformative action as it served to enable shared futures for the project. We discuss the implications of these findings, arguing that future making should be more direct, political, and relational.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 407-432"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.11.001
{"title":"Future Making: Imagining and Crafting Futures in a Diverse World","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.11.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.11.001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 393-406"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.005
Marysol Ortega Pallanez
Visioning—the act of imagining futures—plays a crucial role in design, projecting possibilities, desires, and intentional directions into the future. Yet visioning methods face significant limitations, especially in Global South settings. These include the challenge of asking individuals in life-threatening contexts to imagine ideal scenarios, and the persuasive force of innovations from Global North contexts, which reflect ontological and temporal linearity. To address these limitations, this article focuses on the future-making experiences of women and plants in public spaces in Hermosillo, Mexico. In this city, women and plants are excluded from public spaces by design. In response, women formed collective embroidery circles. As a culturally situated practice, embroidery loosens the constraints of linearity through embodied reflexivity and cyclical temporality. In these circles, women reflected on their relationships with plants and the local ecosystem; rather than relying on long-term visioning, they made futures through tactile and affective embodied encounters with the public space. The article introduces conviviality as an approach for future-making, emphasizing people’s capacity to transform their lives through relational, affective, and material practices. The findings cover three themes: re-existence of memories and recognition of possibilities; how women-plant entanglements reveal the value of those relations; and the convivial reappropriation of the public space through embroidery and design. By foregrounding affect, embodiment, and cyclical temporality, this work contributes to emerging conversations in design and organizational theory about how futures are imagined, enacted, and made available through transformative acts in the here and now.
{"title":"Resensing Visions: A Convivial Approach to Future-Making from a Global South Context in Hermosillo, Mexico","authors":"Marysol Ortega Pallanez","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Visioning—the act of imagining futures—plays a crucial role in design, projecting possibilities, desires, and intentional directions into the future. Yet visioning methods face significant limitations, especially in Global South settings. These include the challenge of asking individuals in life-threatening contexts to imagine ideal scenarios, and the persuasive force of innovations from Global North contexts, which reflect ontological and temporal linearity. To address these limitations, this article focuses on the future-making experiences of women and plants in public spaces in Hermosillo, Mexico. In this city, women and plants are excluded from public spaces by design. In response, women formed collective embroidery circles. As a culturally situated practice, embroidery loosens the constraints of linearity through embodied reflexivity and cyclical temporality. In these circles, women reflected on their relationships with plants and the local ecosystem; rather than relying on long-term visioning, they made futures through tactile and affective embodied encounters with the public space. The article introduces conviviality as an approach for future-making, emphasizing people’s capacity to transform their lives through relational, affective, and material practices. The findings cover three themes: re-existence of memories and recognition of possibilities; how women-plant entanglements reveal the value of those relations; and the convivial reappropriation of the public space through embroidery and design. By foregrounding affect, embodiment, and cyclical temporality, this work contributes to emerging conversations in design and organizational theory about how futures are imagined, enacted, and made available through transformative acts in the here and now.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 433-459"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Addressing futures uncertainty requires collective effort to imagine and make futures that are more desirable to organizations and societies. This article investigates how design artifacts can support practitioners in making imagined futures tangible through the interplay between discourse and materiality. We organized a Future Workshop involving sixty practitioners that produced thirty design artifacts and twenty hours of recorded conversations. Through axial coding, we identified five distinct practices unfolding between discourse and materiality, spanning analytical immersion and emotional awakening. First, we contribute to future-making literature by conceptualizing how imagined futures become more tangible through design artifacts before they are implemented within organizations. Second, we unpack the role of emotions—an underexplored dimension in future-making—in fueling this process. Finally, we introduce two tools to practitioners, the first titled “Future Moments” and the second titled “Future Experiences of Life.” These two tools aim to facilitate the production of relevant design artifacts for making imagined futures.
{"title":"Making Imagined Futures through Design: The Interplay between Discourse and Materiality","authors":"Ilaria Durante, Claudio Dell’Era, Stefano Magistretti","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Addressing futures uncertainty requires collective effort to imagine and make futures that are more desirable to organizations and societies. This article investigates how design artifacts can support practitioners in making imagined futures tangible through the interplay between discourse and materiality. We organized a Future Workshop involving sixty practitioners that produced thirty design artifacts and twenty hours of recorded conversations. Through axial coding, we identified five distinct practices unfolding between discourse and materiality, spanning analytical immersion and emotional awakening. First, we contribute to future-making literature by conceptualizing how imagined futures become more tangible through design artifacts before they are implemented within organizations. Second, we unpack the role of emotions—an underexplored dimension in future-making—in fueling this process. Finally, we introduce two tools to practitioners, the first titled “Future Moments” and the second titled “Future Experiences of Life.” These two tools aim to facilitate the production of relevant design artifacts for making imagined futures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 489-508"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.006
Alessandra Migliore , Chiara Tagliaro
This article explores how the experience of organizational space shapes the enactment of imagined futures of work. While research on future-making emphasizes the value of imagining multiple distant futures, it has paid limited attention to how such futures are grounded in the spatial and experiential realities of everyday organizational life. Drawing on the emerging spatial turn in organization studies and using a longitudinal qualitative case study of a large Italian business association preparing for a major headquarters redesign, we examine how stakeholders engage with their future of work in the context of a major workplace transformation. Our findings identify three future-making trajectories—speculating, projecting, and realizing—each shaped by distinct spatial experiences and stakeholder positions. We also identify two recursive practices—criticizing and aspiring—through which imagined futures loop back to reshape perceptions of present space. We conceptualize this recursive process as unfolding within an emergent in-between space, a liminal and processual zone where imagined futures and lived spaces co-construct each other. By positioning space as both a medium and an outcome of future-making, we contribute to the literature on future-making by conceptualizing the spatial path dependency of future enactment.
{"title":"“Back to the Future”: Making the Future Organizational Space from Experience to Imagination and Back","authors":"Alessandra Migliore , Chiara Tagliaro","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.08.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article explores how the experience of organizational space shapes the enactment of imagined futures of work. While research on future-making emphasizes the value of imagining multiple distant futures, it has paid limited attention to how such futures are grounded in the spatial and experiential realities of everyday organizational life. Drawing on the emerging spatial turn in organization studies and using a longitudinal qualitative case study of a large Italian business association preparing for a major headquarters redesign, we examine how stakeholders engage with their future of work in the context of a major workplace transformation. Our findings identify three future-making trajectories—speculating, projecting, and realizing—each shaped by distinct spatial experiences and stakeholder positions. We also identify two recursive practices—criticizing and aspiring—through which imagined futures loop back to reshape perceptions of present space. We conceptualize this recursive process as unfolding within an emergent <em>in-between space</em>, a liminal and processual zone where imagined futures and lived spaces co-construct each other. By positioning space as both a medium and an outcome of future-making, we contribute to the literature on future-making by conceptualizing the spatial path dependency of future enactment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 460-488"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.002
Samuel Yu
Against the backdrop of a global socio-ecological crisis, transition design seeks to envision and realize more desirable future worlds. Framing transition design as a redirective practice, this article draws on the concepts of defuturing and ontological design to present a typology of design tactics. These tactics are organized within a proposed framework for sustainable future-making that outlines diverse approaches to imagining and designing for transitions. The seven tactics—refusal, elimination, revival, amplification, maintenance, modification, and invention—serve as both a provocation and a heuristic, bringing coherence to multiple pathways toward more sustainable futures. Together they emphasize the need to address the ontological inertia and directionality of what has already been designed and continues to defuture. To support redirective future-making in practice, the framework offers creative prompts for envisioning alternative futures and strategic guidance for realizing them.
{"title":"Redirective Tactics for Designing Transitions: A Typology of Sustainable Future-Making Pathways","authors":"Samuel Yu","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Against the backdrop of a global socio-ecological crisis, transition design seeks to envision and realize more desirable future worlds. Framing transition design as a <em>redirective practice</em>, this article draws on the concepts of <em>defuturing</em> and <em>ontological design</em> to present a typology of design tactics. These tactics are organized within a proposed framework for sustainable <em>future-making</em> that outlines diverse approaches to imagining and designing for transitions. The seven tactics—refusal, elimination, revival, amplification, maintenance, modification, and invention—serve as both a provocation and a heuristic, bringing coherence to multiple pathways toward more sustainable futures. Together they emphasize the need to address the ontological inertia and directionality of what has already been designed and continues to defuture. To support redirective future-making in practice, the framework offers creative prompts for envisioning alternative futures and strategic guidance for realizing them.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 525-542"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/S2405-8726(25)00082-6
{"title":"Contributors and Acknowledgment to Referees 2025","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/S2405-8726(25)00082-6","DOIUrl":"10.1016/S2405-8726(25)00082-6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages I-XIII"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.004
Michael Shamiyeh
{"title":"Don Norman on Design, Business, and What It Takes to Make the Future","authors":"Michael Shamiyeh","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 543-552"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01DOI: 10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.001
Frédérik Lesage , Gillian Russell , Samein Shamsher
In this article, we develop a conceptual framework for democratizing futures making, a practice often dominated by corporate and professional elites. We argue that more inclusive participation requires a deeper engagement with the pedagogical dimensions of how people come to imagine, explore, and shape the future together. To this end, we introduce scaffolding as a structured approach to futures making through embedded, embodied, and emergent processes. In the first section, we critically examine futures literacy as an approach to democratizing futures making and show why its cognitivist and linguistic focus is limited. Drawing on design theory and organizational theory, we outline how a new materialist perspective offers a more viable alternative. In the second section, we revisit scaffolding as a pedagogical metaphor used to organize learning, reframing it through materialist perspectives to avoid prescriptive interpretations. In the final section, we describe how scaffolding can be put into practice as part of futures making.
{"title":"Scaffolding Futures Making: Facilitating a More Democratizing Futuring Practice","authors":"Frédérik Lesage , Gillian Russell , Samein Shamsher","doi":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.sheji.2025.10.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this article, we develop a conceptual framework for democratizing futures making, a practice often dominated by corporate and professional elites. We argue that more inclusive participation requires a deeper engagement with the pedagogical dimensions of how people come to imagine, explore, and shape the future together. To this end, we introduce <em>scaffolding</em> as a structured approach to futures making through embedded, embodied, and emergent processes. In the first section, we critically examine futures literacy as an approach to democratizing futures making and show why its cognitivist and linguistic focus is limited. Drawing on design theory and organizational theory, we outline how a new materialist perspective offers a more viable alternative. In the second section, we revisit scaffolding as a pedagogical metaphor used to organize learning, reframing it through materialist perspectives to avoid prescriptive interpretations. In the final section, we describe how scaffolding can be put into practice as part of futures making.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":37146,"journal":{"name":"She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation","volume":"11 4","pages":"Pages 509-524"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145792249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}