Systemic design aims for desirable change in complex, multi-stakeholder social systems in approaching complex societal challenges. For such social innovation to be effectively implemented, multiple stakeholders in organisations are often required to change their (course of) action. To enable such actions, an acceptance of a reframe of the challenge is often required. In this paper, we argue that an organisation can be considered the manifestation of its members' frames at any given time. Innovation and design practitioners experience challenges creating the desired change of action in organisational settings following a reframing activity. Since frames are social constructs, we argue that the social dynamics of influence on frame acceptance is an important concept to consider. We define social dynamics as the ways and extent to which the behaviour of actors in a social interaction influences the thinking and doing of other actors in that interaction. Understanding this might help develop strategies to increase the impact of innovation efforts in complex organisational and systemic settings. In this paper, we conceptualise the social dynamics of frame acceptance through a literature review of frames, organisations, reframing, and innovation. We conclude with a research agenda to work towards an improved understanding of how social dynamics influence frame acceptance in reframing processes in organisational settings.@en

Public organizations are increasingly turning to design thinking to address wicked societal issues, enhance innovation, and improve services. However, in general, public organizations do not provide the most receptive context for design thinking. To be applied effectively, design thinking requires sufficient tolerance for uncertainty, capacity for risk-taking, receptiveness to new ideas, and flexibility to learn and adapt. Public organizations, instead, favor rationality, stability, and accountability, and are therefore generally characterized as rigid and risk-averse. Additional efforts are thus required to make way for design thinking within this context. Until now, research on strategies to support the application of design thinking in a public sector context is limited. In this paper, 14 design thinking projects in the public sector were analyzed to identify these strategies, resulting in a practical framework of strategic actions to build confidence, form an alliance, generate support, enhance compatibility, and thereby enable design thinking in the public sector. Accordingly, this study contributes to the theory and practice of design thinking for public issues.

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In this paper, we explore how resilience and wellbeing can integrate into, and improve design pedagogy. We establish 10 principles for designer resilience from workshops with students, educators and design practitioners. Each principle offers a platform to develop subsequent learning activities that remedy hollow didactic statements observed in education and research discourse (embrace complexity, navigate uncertainty and ambiguity). Future research will report on the results of integrating these principles and subsequent learning activities into a revised Master of Science design curriculum.

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Transdisciplinary research is claimed to be essential in tackling today’s complex societal challenges. Transdisciplinarity includes collaboration and integration across academic disciplines, non-academic ways of knowing, and the ‘real world’ of citizens, professionals and other stakeholders. Design can contribute to transdisciplinarity by framing complex challenges, integrating knowledge towards synthesizing solutions, and providing participatory practices to engage with the real world. However, for design to be successful in transdisciplinary research contexts, a better understanding of transdisciplinarity and design is required. In this paper I present a conceptual and practical perspective on transdisciplinary de-sign. I show how design relates to three different conceptions of transdisciplinarity: a multi-level disciplinary practice, a participatory practice, and a practice focused on complexity and social learning. Furthermore, I propose a set of trans-disciplinary competences that enhance designers’ ability to contribute to tack-ling complex societal challenges, including epistemic intelligence, worldview awareness, power literacy and reflexive and dialogic skills@en

While the Pandemic has increased awareness towards student wellbeing in higher education (HE), it also exacerbated existing challenges. Specifically, students pursuing their master graduation thesis often find themselves isolated and overwhelmed due to the individualistic nature of their project and the pressure to create a ‘masterpiece’. In this paper, we provide insight into how designing for community can positively impact thesis design students’ motivation, sense of community and wellbeing, which we identify as drivers of student success. We discuss and evaluate a community-based learning (CBL) program we designed and implemented to improve student success during the master thesis journey of 92 students at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, XXXX. Our findings from the program are that; (1) facilitating connections between students generates a sense of community; (2) a customizable program supports student agency which in turn drives motivation; (3) a focus on student success instead of performance improves wellbeing.
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In recent years, governments have increasingly pursued innovation by embed-ding design into their organizations. One particularly common approach to em-bedding design in government organization is to establish public sector innova-tion labs. These labs are described as contributors and facilitators of innovation in policymaking processes; however, less light has been shed on the role of in-house designers (including these labs) in fostering and managing the changes made by design practices within government organizations. In the current study, design management has been used as a theoretical lens to study the strategic activities of in-house designers in a Dutch municipality to embed design within the organization. The findings show the importance of strategic activity by in-house designers to foster design practice and resulting organizational changes and the need for participation of more organizational members in this activity. We conclude with setting an agenda for more research and practices on strategic activities to foster design practices and organizational changes in government.@en

Service design is increasingly seen as a means to enable systemic change in complex contexts. The contexts in which services are co-produced—the social group, network, service organisation, or ecosystem—can be considered complex social systems. A characteristic of complex social systems is that new system behaviour emerges through a mechanism called self-organisation. Self-organisation shows how human relationships are at the core of social systemic change. Such systemic changes are reflected in system behaviour such as adaptation, mutual learning, and collective creativity and motivation. As service design is in essence about human relationships, it becomes relevant to ask how we can design for human relationships to positively enable social systemic change? In this paper, I argue that expert design reasoning is an important source in designing conditions that enable positive human relationships, and that this design reasoning can be expanded to work towards a design rationale for systemic change by building on theories of complex social systems. I illustrate this perspective with the reasoning of service designers in two cases, who used their insights to design for human relationships. I conclude with a discussion of the implications for service design practice and service design education.

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Binnen het IDOLS*-programma werd op een vernieuwende en creatieve manier gewerkt aan maatschappelijke vraagstukken. Dit gebeurde in consortia van probleemhouders uit verschillende sectoren en opdrachtnemers uit de culturele en creatieve sector. Het belangrijkste doel van het programma was het vergroten van het verdienvermogen van de culturele en creatieve industrie en het promoten van maatschappelijke innovatie. Het onderzoek in dit rapport beschrijft de (in)directe effecten en neveneffecten (ook wel spillovers genoemd) van het IDOLS*-programma op de lange termijn. We hebben in lijn met de doelstellingen van het programma gekeken naar zowel de impact van de gegenereerde innovatie als het effect op het vergroten van de arbeidsmarkt en het verdienvermogen van de culturele en creatieve sector. Dit onderzoek vormt daarmee een aanvulling op eerder onderzoek naar de waarde en impact van IDOLS*, dat vrijwel direct na afloop van het programma in 2020 is uitgevoerd. De onderzoeksmethode bestond uit acht semigestructureerde interviews met geselecteerde deelnemers van verschillende consortia die een sleutelrol hebben gespeeld in de ontwikkelingen na afloop van het programma. Hiermee kregen we antwoord op de volgende onderzoeksvragen: 1. Wat zijn de langetermijneffecten van het IDOLS*-programma met betrekking tot de maatschappelijke en economische impact van de gegenereerde innovaties? 2. Wat zijn de langetermijneffecten van het IDOLS*-programma met betrekking tot de ontwikkeling van het professionele netwerk en de reputatie van de creatieve en culturele industrie? 3. Wat voor rol heeft het IDOLS*-programma gespeeld in de ontwikkeling van deze langetermijneffecten? In antwoord op onderzoeksvraag 1 en 2 zien we een grote verscheidenheid aan maatschappelijke, economische, netwerk- en reputatie-(bij)effecten. Deze variëteit kan toegewezen worden aan het feit dat consortia redelijk vrij waren in het definiëren van de vraagstelling en in de uitvoer van het project. In dit onderzoek onderscheiden we twee typerende rollen die IDOLS* heeft gespeeld in het creëren van die langetermijneffecten. Ten eerste door bestaande initiatieven te versterken en ten tweede door nieuwe netwerken te stimuleren. Hierbij zien we dat projecten die bestaande initiatieven versterken vooral leiden tot maatschappelijke en economische effecten, terwijl projecten die nieuwe netwerken stimuleren vooral netwerk- en reputatie-effecten tot gevolg hebben. We zien een relatief beperkte directe impact van de innovaties. Twee van de acht consortia zijn nu, ongeveer anderhalf jaar nadat het project officieel werd afgerond, nog actief bezig met de ontwikkeling en opschaling van de resultaten van IDOLS*. Bij drie andere consortia zijn de innovaties na afloop van het programma een stap verder gebracht maar is het proces daarna gestopt. Factoren die hierbij een rol kunnen spelen zijn gebrek aan eigenaarschap en gebrek aan capaciteit om projecten verder te brengen. In drie gevallen is de opgedane kennis omgezet in een minder tastbare doorontwikkeling, zoals andere manieren van werken of een doorvertaling van een innovatie of idee naar een beleidsprogramma. Uit de interviews blijkt dat er netwerkeffecten en reputatie-effecten zijn gegenereerd waarvan we aannemen dat die positief bijdragen aan het verdienvermogen van de culturele en creatieve industrie. Het directe verdienvermogen kon in deze studie echter niet gemeten worden. Drie van de acht onderzochte consortia hebben zich doorontwikkeld tot een sterk netwerk dat nog in de volle breedte opereert en van waaruit nieuw opdrachtgeverschap voortvloeit. Bij vier andere consortia zijn er nog steeds sterke individuele samenwerkingsrelaties, bijvoorbeeld tussen een probleemeigenaar en één van de partners uit de creatieve en culturele industrie. Eén van de onderzochte consortia heeft niet geleid tot nieuwe samenwerkingen na afloop van het project. Naast deze netwerkeffecten heeft IDOLS* ook tot reputatie-effecten geleid. Er zijn meerdere factoren die bijdragen aan deze reputatie-effecten. In het IDOLS*-programma kon bij deelnemende probleemeigenaren de waarde gedemonstreerd worden van een creatieve aanpak in maatschappelijke vraagstukken. Ook konden binnen IDOLS* aansprekende casussen ontwikkeld worden die inspirerend zijn voor niet-deelnemende organisaties en tot nieuw opdrachtgeverschap kunnen leiden. Zowel deze sterke netwerken en verhoogde reputatie van de sector kunnen door nieuw opdrachtgeverschap uiteindelijk zorgen voor nieuwe innovaties die op hun beurt maatschappelijke en economische waarde kunnen opleveren. We concluderen dat het IDOLS*-programma een grote variëteit aan langetermijneffecten heeft opgeleverd. Het onderzoek geeft geen inzicht in de directe oorzaak van deze effecten. Het is aannemelijk dat elementen van het programma en contextuele factoren meespelen. Daarnaast zijn er ook effecten verkregen die niet direct aansluiten bij de doelstelling van het programma. Om de kans te vergroten dat er effecten verkregen worden die in lijn liggen met de doelstelling van het programma, doen wij als belangrijkste aanbeveling dat het programma wordt ingericht op één van de gepresenteerde rollen. Of er kan gekozen worden om diversificatie in het programma aan te brengen, ten aanzien van deze verschillende rollen. Dit kan bereikt worden door gericht vorm te geven aan de criteria waarop deelnemende consortia geselecteerd worden, door verwachtingen tussen aspirant-consortia en het programma (en tussen deelnemers binnen consortia) te managen, door coaching, educatie en financiering in te richten naar het doel van het programma en de samenstelling van consortia, en door na afloop van het programma meer aandacht te geven en ondersteuning te bieden aan het in stand houden van netwerken.@en

Knowledge on how design practices evolve and become part of the daily practices of public organisations is still lacking. Prior to embarking on this research, we asked ourselves how this phenomenon should be studied in the context of public organisations. In the complex system of an organisation, practices are in constant flux, making it difficult to understand how a practice evolves based on certain factors such as leadership, legitimacy, or organisational culture. Adopting an alternative approach, including ‘time’ as an analytic element, we attempted to understand the evolution of design practices through a sequence of relevant past events. In a series of case studies of local government, we collected data through publicly available organisational documents related to design practices and visualised these data in a timeline. With the results, we constructed a narrative on how design practices have evolved over time in these organisations. This paper describes one case study at Kent County Council in the UK showing how this document-based, process-oriented research approach allowed us to capture the evolution of design practices in a public organisation over a 12-year period within a short research time and with greater objectivity. In conclusion, we argue that this longitudinal research method can be a new approach for researchers conducting studies on design practices within public organisations.@en

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.

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Positive student wellbeing is intrinsically connected to positive learning outcomes. Students learn more when they feel well, and the way we shape education influences the way students feel. The COVID-19 crisis has forced us to radically change our design education and is having a large impact on student wellbeing and learning. While some students manage well to adapt to the new circumstances, others struggle and face challenges such as risk of burnout, lack of motivation, and social isolation. In this paper we describe how we approached this challenge by applying methods and principles from strategic human-centred design and systems thinking. The strategic design approach included researching values and patterns in student and staff experiences. The systems approach meant that we saw the university as a complex adaptive system, which focused our activities on connecting staff and students who were and are running multiple creative experiments to promote student wellbeing. This approach is strategic because it supports continuous design and implementation of initiatives to promote wellbeing. While this is work in progress, we here present a number of design principles that we developed through this work that enable future designs that promote student wellbeing in (pandemic) higher education.

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Moving into the social and public sector, service design is becoming both more complex and more participatory. This is reflected in the greater diversity and interrelatedness of stakeholders and the wicked problems being addressed. However, although many service designers working in the social and public domains bring into their design practice the intention to make design more participatory and equitable, they may lack an in-depth understanding of power, privilege, and the social structures (norms, roles, rules, assumptions, and beliefs) that uphold structural inequality. In this paper we present findings from seven interviews with service designers to investigate the challenges they face when addressing power issues in design, and their experiences of how power shows up in their design process. By drawing from understandings of power in social theory, as well as the interviewees’ perspectives on how power manifests in design practice, we outline a framework for power literacy in service design. The framework comprises five forms of power found in design practice: privilege, access power, goal power, role power, and rule power. We conclude by suggesting that service design practices that make use of reflexivity to develop power literacy may contribute to more socially just, decolonial, and democratic design practices.

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The benefits of student–staff partnerships are widely reported in the Students-as-Partners literature. It is envisaged that partnership initiatives can have a transformative effect on institutional cultures, however, how this transformation might be achieved is less clear. Building on transdisciplinary and systems change perspectives, we propose a Partnership Outcome Spaces framework to develop an understanding of how student–staff partnerships might influence institutional cultures. We identify four outcome spaces: situation, knowledge, learning and relationships, with reflexivity and a structured partnership methodology as key enablers of these outcomes. This framework is applied to a case study examining a Student Services Hub project in one Australian university. Through this analysis, the importance of less tangible and relational outcomes arising from student–staff partnerships are highlighted. To influence institutional culture change, we encourage student–staff partnership practitioners to purposefully negotiate the various possible outcomes of their initiatives as an integral part of the partnership process.

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This article presents empirical findings and recommendations from a survey of 100 industrial design engineering students from the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. The article adopts a self-deterministic motivation lens to present findings from a qualitative survey (N=100 respondents) and two member check workshops with design students and educators regarding motivations to study during COVID-19 restrictions. We identify that COVID-19 lockdown measures compromise three psychological prerequisites for motivation: ‘relatedness’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘competency’. We find that resilient students who have a sense of ‘purpose’ remain highly motivated. The article reveals creative approaches students are applying to build and sustain motivation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article contributes recommendations for educators and administrators to promote student motivation in pandemic and post-pandemic higher education. This article contributes novel insights regarding how students in particular are remaining motivated to study during COVID-19.

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In recent decades, design has expanded from a practice aimed at designing things to one that helps to address complex societal challenges. In this context, a field of practice called systemic design has emerged, which combines elements of systems thinking with elements of design. We use a case study approach to investigate how expert practitioners carry out systemic design work in the context of public and social innovation, and explore what we can learn from their practices and design rationales when we compare them to systems thinking theories and approaches. Based on findings from five case studies, we present five systemic design principles: 1) opening up and acknowledging the interrelatedness of problems; 2) developing empathy with the system; 3) strengthening human relationships to enable creativity and learning; 4) influencing mental models to enable change; and 5) adopting an evolutionary design approach to desired systemic change. One way that scholars can contribute to this field is by continuing to monitor and describe emerging systemic design principles developed and performed at the forefront of the field, strengthening these learnings by building on the body of knowledge about systems thinking and design.

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Partnership in higher education has gained prominence over recent decades, but recent studies have identified a lack of research exploring how partnership practices unfold in specific disciplinary contexts. This article explores how a transdisciplinary approach can be used to better understand and facilitate student–staff partnerships where staff and students have diverse disciplinary backgrounds and knowledge. We present a case study of the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney, focusing on the adaptation of our curriculum co-creation processes by drawing on multiple knowledge types through a reflexive process of mutual learning. We conclude that explicit consideration of these principles, which are common to both transdisciplinary and partnership frameworks, have the potential to enhance consideration of diverse perspectives and the roles played by worldviews, norms and values when building student–staff partnerships around curriculum co-creation.

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In order for universities to flourish, we need to ensure that their staff and students are well mentally, physically and socially. Improving wellbeing is an open, systemic and complex challenge, because it contains many interrelated and dynamic problems and concerns. Such challenges cannot be ‘solved’ by using traditional and reductionist problem-solving strategies. In this paper we demonstrate how we worked towards an integrated systemic design and transdisciplinary innovation approach to improve the wellbeing of staff and students at the University of Technology Sydney. We developed a systemic vision of university wellbeing which considers wellbeing a characteristic of the community as a whole, and an integral part of education and research, rather than an issue that needs to be addressed by a separate ‘service’. The transdisciplinary and systemic design approach is further characterised by an ongoing evolutionary action-approach; an integration of diverse ways of knowing including various academic disciplines, Indigenous ways of knowing and community knowledge; and a structured learning strategy to support system change based on mutual learning and reflexivity. We discuss how this case illustrates how transdisciplinary learning approaches can strengthen systemic design practices@en

Public and social sector organizations are increasingly turning to innovation as a way to address the complex problems that society is facing. Design practice has already contributed significantly to public and social innovation, but to be effective at the public and social systems level, these practices must be adapted. This study investigates how five public and social innovation agencies adapted and used the core design practice of problem framing to address complex problems in society. The frames evolved according to nonlinear patterns through the co-evolution of problem and solution spaces. Practitioners adapted their framing practices to suit the complex social contexts by applying systemic design principles, pursuing multiple solutions and problem frames, and operationalizing wider research and thinking methods that align with the complex nature of each specific challenge. I argue that such practices require high-level expertise, and that capability building in public and social innovation should consider these emerging practices and levels of expertise.

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In Hong Kong of the year 2017, a new academic community convened to attend to pressing issues regarding design as source of innovation. The inaugural Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference (nee Design Management Academy) attended to a sense of urgency regarding the adoption of design capabilities within organisations as source of innovation. The title of the conference, Research perspectives on creative intersections was therefore pertinent, with papers exploring how design and designers were intersecting with new business challenges. Two years later in London (2019), rhetoric has notably shifted from matters of adoption to strengthening design capabilities within organisations, thereby enabling those organisations to unlock the possibilities and subsequent benefits of design. These possibilities include but are not limited to strategic and cultural renewal, design of new processes and meaningful engagement with hard-to-reach stakeholders.
To address the complex nature of today’s societal and economic problems, professional organisations now recognize that traditional tools and approaches may not provide the required solutions. To address complex challenges, many managers and business leaders have consciously turned to design approaches over the past decade, including both public and private sectors. To increase design capabilities, these organisations have established innovation labs with designers, have recruited designers in strategic positions, and/or have started building the design competence of existing staff through educational programs, often provided by design consultancies. Yet to date, describing the resultant impact of teaching. Individual design competencies on organisational design capabilities has proven elusive.@en