She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation最新文献

Paternalism is an instance of someone making a decision on behalf of someone else. A professional designer can exhibit paternalism through conceptualizing, defining, and selecting current or preferable situations or while finalizing outcomes for stakeholders. Paternalism is thus, a critical ethical dimension related to the design profession. The design academy and community must theorize paternalism if we are to avoid or reduce it. Paternalism may be present at three critical junctures of design decision making. Our three-layer framework examines paternalism as it relates to design process decisions, decisions about participation in design, and normative framework decisions. The circular model represents the hierarchy of paternalistic decision making: any effort to overcome paternalism at the (inner) design level or (middle) participatory level will be ineffective if it is present in the (outer) normative layer. We discuss the extent of possible exhibitions of paternalism and the challenges to avoiding it in decisions at each layer, and contrast these briefly with overtly paternalistic design approaches, such as design for behavior change. We find that design may be inherently paternalistic, at times may need to be that way (in certain contexts especially, where expertise is required for decisions to be made accurately), and that it is up to the individual designer whether they exhibit paternalism in their design decisions or not.

Despite claims that design has moved beyond making artifacts and products, prevailing theories of design thinking in organizations remain entrenched in the making or technē paradigm. Ironically, this serves to maintain the status quo and stifle progress. Two highly visible technē models are intervention design, publicized by IDEO, and enterprise design thinking, popularized by IBM. While distinct, they deploy the same strategy: locate the vectors of organizational change in individual agents—in projects (as complex artifacts) or in professionals (as reified resources)—and implicitly argue that constant proximity or direct contact between design actors and non-design actors is necessary to generate systems change. This constant interfacing, a natural outworking of the technē paradigm, ultimately limits real transformation—it ignores the importance of social location and symbolic capital in social systems and assumes that human organizations are deficient by default. As a result, the technē paradigm resorts to a “surplus by numbers” approach that leads to the excessive proliferation of a suboptimal form of design. For design to flourish in organizations and build better theories, designers need to become more critical of the productive world and critics (in the ameliorative sense of the term) who can reshape the social world.

Academic journals are not known for the quality of their visual designs or the reading experiences they provide, despite being fundamental to the dissemination of research and knowledge in most disciplines. Journals are produced by and for scholars and are considered currency within academic culture; however, little is known about how visual design affects a journal’s perceived prestige or reading experience. This paper discusses a survey conducted to investigate reader perceptions of academic journals across disciplines. We used quantitative and qualitative responses to understand reader practices and preferences as they pertain to format and visual design. Across disciplines, issues related to access, prestige, readability, and academic culture were said to influence reading experience. Survey respondents indicated a desire for improved reading experiences, especially on digital platforms. The article concludes with a discussion about how publishers and editors may confront these issues and consider the diverse needs of their readers.

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 emerge within complex contexts. Complex challenges cannot simply be resolved, due to their dynamic, non-linear nature. Instead, the complex context itself can be steered in a certain desired direction through iterative action and learning cycles. Transdisciplinary approaches help us understand how different perspectives and ways of knowing held by relevant actors can be combined to serve effective action in complex contexts. We have integrated complexity theory and transdisciplinarity to create a co-evolutionary model of innovation illustrating that who we work with, how we work, and what we learn and create co-evolve over time. We show how an innovation approach based on building a vision and including a reflexive social learning method can provide a guiding structure to this co-evolutionary process. We illustrate this approach with a case study focused on improving the well-being of staff and students at a university. We conclude the paper with implications for design.

Purpose, essence, and simplicity can provide a foundation for humility in the practice of human-centered design. While those qualities may assist in preparing narratives about the findings and applications of science, they also can be used to justify sloppy practices in the conduct of science itself. Slodderwetenschap (Dutch for “sloppy science”) is a form of carelessness characterized by the willingness to tolerate scientific shortcuts and the failure to question the assumptions that tolerance enables. Good science seldom comes from taking shortcuts or relying on “truthies”—assertions that feel true, regardless of their validity. Instead, good science demands that we continually ask what affords meaning to a given factoid, label, category, or narrative. Then, it requires that we base further inquiry on the assumptions, contexts, and constraints this inquiry reveals. This article opens a discussion into the dangers and practices of sloppy science.

Current production and consumption patterns are unsustainable, causing irreversible damage to the environment and human health and well-being. Designers play a vital role in resolving this problem—their decisions affect product manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal—and hence they must be aware of the positive and negative impacts of their design decisions. Sustainable product design education is key to developing the knowledge, skills, and responsibility required for future generations of product designers and their educators to make informed and responsible decisions within their practice, and also enhance the social and environmental performance of their creations and effectively communicate the value of such decisions within a commercial context. In this article, we present insights and challenges in contemporary sustainable product design education in higher education. We document the experiences of six academics involved in teaching and researching sustainable product design in the United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United States. We hope to provide a useful reference for academics seeking to adopt sustainable product design practices in their existing programs, develop new sustainable product design education programs, or reflect on their own existing product design practice.

Descriptions of problem-solution “co-evolution” either explicitly or implicitly draw an analogy between processes of design and processes of biological evolution. Analogies of this kind are common in research because of their potential to assist in explanation and discovery. However, reviewing the design literature reveals that the discussion of design co-evolution has become disconnected from the biological analogy on which it is founded, and from which other disciplines draw. Here, I explore the function of the co-evolution analogy, provide an illustrative example from biology, and explore the varieties of co-evolution to which design might be compared. By doing so, I propose two possible directions for expanding the design co-evolution concept: (i) examining what co-evolves in addition to, or instead of, problems and solutions, and (ii) examining the different levels at which co-evolution occurs. Both of these proposals are illustrated with a variant of the design co-evolution diagram.