Integrating Design in Governance and Management by Metzner-Szigeth, Andreas; Kofler, Ingrid; Pechlaner, Harald;

Short description:

Exploring the integration of design into governance and management practices, this book provides clear and actionable insights into how design methodologies can enhance professional practices in these fields. With a strong emphasis on practical applications, it is relevant to students, government professionals, and consultants.

Long description:

This book explores how design can be meaningfully integrated into governance and management practices to address complex societal challenges.

Bringing together conceptual insights, empirical research, and practice-based approaches, the volume offers a critical and forward-looking perspective on the role of design in shaping future-oriented decision-making. It argues that design should not be understood merely as a tool for innovation, but as a practice of sense-making, experimentation, and world-making that helps translate abstract ambitions into actionable futures. Governance, management, and design are distinct yet increasingly interconnected practices. While governance organizes collective decision-making and management focuses on strategy and resource allocation, design has expanded beyond products and services to engage with systems, organizations, and futures. In contexts marked by uncertainty, polycrisis, and transformation, design approaches, from systemic and participatory design to speculative and practice-based methods, are increasingly mobilized to navigate complexity, mediate between actors, and prototype alternative pathways. This book critically examines these developments, highlighting both the transformative potential of design-based approaches and the risks of their instrumentalization. Through interdisciplinary contributions and case studies from Europe and North America, it demonstrates how design can support more reflexive, inclusive, and sustainable forms of governance and management.

This volume is relevant for students, researchers, and practitioners in design, governance, management, and sustainability fields, as well as for policy-makers, consultants, and professionals seeking to engage with innovative and critical approaches to contemporary transformation processes.

Table of Contents:

Introduction  Part 1: Reframing Governance, Management, and Design: Conceptual, critical, and epistemological perspectives  1. On Sustainable Futures, Generative Competences, and the Nexus of Governance, Management and Design  2. Design Strategy versus Strategy Design: Leadership Perspectives in a Complex World  3. Design in, with, for and by Government: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly  4. Beyond the Technical Grid: Reclaiming Organizational Meaning through Management by Design  5. To Nest is to World: Reframing Design, Governance and Management as Ontogenetic Practice  6. The Effectiveness of Development Cooperation: What Has the Promotion of Good Governance Achieved?  Part 2: Design for Eco-Social Transformation and Organizational Practice: Systemic, participatory, and practice-oriented approaches  7. Supporting Circular Economy Policies by Applying Systemic Design Tools  8. The Responsible Innovator. Reckoning the legitimacy of competing worldviews through a role-playing game  9. Designing for Transformation: The Tiny Fop Mob and the Governance of Real-World Labs  10. “Collaboration ChitChatter”: Expanding design thinking to nurture the awareness of complexity and collaboration amongst a new generation of eco-social designers  11. Destination Design: New Perspectives for the Development of Touristic Destinations through Approaches and Instruments from Design Research  12. Design is an Attitude: When the Creative Discipline Takes Responsibility
Part 3: Imagining, Exploring, and Shaping Futures: Speculation, foresight, technology, and atmospheres  13. An Ambiguous Utopia: On the Interplay between Design, Speculation and the Future  14. Leveraging Scenarios for Strategic Foresight and Applied Futures Research  15. Atmospheres in tourism design  16. Perception of Tourism Atmosphere at Mine Sites: An Exploratory Empirical Analysis Utilising Virtual Reality  17. Outlook