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

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.

One of the most influential descriptions of design activity emphasizes how problems and solutions “co-evolve.” This concept has somehow escaped critical review and cross-disciplinary comparison, resulting in a fragmented approach to the subject. Reviewing the published literature on design co-evolution reveals that the term is used to refer to a range of distinct concepts, and the study of co-evolution has generated a number of elaborations and alternatives. Reviewing the broader literature in design and other disciplines further reveals that discussions of design co-evolution are disconnected from the history of relevant concepts in design research, and disconnected from a range of relevant concepts in other disciplines that describe creative work. Here I examine what the different concepts of design co-evolution are, how they have been modified and what they are related to. This leads to questioning the distinction between problems and solutions, defining them in relative terms, and drawing a connection between design co-evolution and design fixation.

Design research is at an impasse. Everyday design practice requires accounting for the methods and principles of design. Design theory fails to provide such an account. Despite this, the apparent failure of design theory to explain design does not diminish the practice of design. How can this be so? This article investigates this contradictory state of affairs by analyzing the discursive strategies that the contradiction generates. It begins by defining ambiguity and utopia as contrasting dispositions towards social contradictions. Next, it elaborates their relation in a non-design context, the HBO television drama The Wire. Finally, it considers these dispositions in the context of design theory, highlighting the discursive formations that arise from the inability of design theory to fully explain the everyday practice of design. The article concludes by reflecting on the inevitability of this failure and the productive potential of assimilating this ambiguity as a theoretical principle.