Most Downloaded Articles
Wicked Problems: Flexible Characterizations and Visual Representations
Spring 2025
The term “wicked problem” is used to describe a wide range of challenges that defy definition or resolution. These descriptions often reference Rittel and Webber’s 1973 publication, repeatedly listing...
Exhausted and Not Doing Enough? The Productivity Paradox of Contemporary Academia
Summer 2022
Professors today struggle with unreasonable workloads and a work management format antithetical to high quality research and teaching. Recent studies show that many professors suffer from high levels...
Systemic Design Principles in Social Innovation: A Study of Expert Practices and Design Rationales
Autumn 2020
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...
Co-shaping the Future in Quadruple Helix Innovation Systems: Uncovering Public Preferences toward Participatory Research and Innovation
Summer 2019
The Quadruple Helix Model of innovation recognizes four major actors in the innovation system: science, policy, industry, and society. In keeping with this model, more and more governments are prioritizing...
Changing Design Education for the 21st Century
Spring 2020
Designers are entrusted with increasingly complex and impactful challenges. However, the current system of design education does not always prepare students for these challenges. When we examine what...
Systems Thinking and Design Thinking: The Search for Principles in the World We Are Making
Summer 2019
While the concept of system has been part of design theory and practice from the beginning of the discipline, there is renewed interest today in the relationship of systems thinking and design. After...
Designing with Generative AI: Symbiosis, Authorship, and the Evolving Image
Spring 2026
This article explores how generative AI reshapes authorship, presence, and meaning in design. To situate this shift, it compares today’s disruption with photography’s nineteenth-century challenge to...
Posthumanism and Design
Spring 2017
Since at least the mid-1980s, design has been dominated by a human-centered and user-centered paradigm. Currently, the implications of technological and environmental transformations are challenging...
Decolonizing Public Healthcare Systems: Designing with Indigenous Peoples
Winter 2022
Indigenous peoples around the world are being failed by current public health systems. This is directly linked to the ongoing issue of colonialism. We need to decolonize health systems if we want to...
Pluriversal Futures for Design Education
Summer 2023
The Future of Design Education working group on pluriversal design—with members from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, South and Southeastern Asia, North America, Oceania, and Europe—developed recommendations...
Harmony in Design: A Synthesis of Literature from Classical Philosophy, the Sciences, Economics, and Design
Spring 2022
Classical theories of harmony have been used to explain phenomena like beauty, happiness, health, virtue, pleasure, peace, and even ecological sustainability. With the intent of making these theories...
DesignX: Complex Sociotechnical Systems
Winter 2015
This paper is a follow up to DesignX, a position paper written in 2014, which introduced the design challenges of complex sociotechnical systems such as healthcare, transportation, governmental policy,...
Speculative Design as Thought Experiment
Autumn 2021
Speculative design is a subsidiary field of critical design practice. It generally involves developing scenarios based on a central object, often a prototype. Because it is concerned with alternative...
In Conversation with Ezio Manzini: Design for Social Innovation—What We’ve Learned So Far
Spring 2023
Gjoko Muratovski and Ezio Manzini discuss and reflect on the impact of the idea of design for social innovation towards sustainability. In this wide-reaching conversation they cover topics that range...
Design Anthropology and Ontological Future Making: Transformative Action for the Emergence of Shared Futures
Winter 2025
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...
The Future End of Design Work: A Critical Overview of Managerialism, Generative AI, and the Nature of Knowledge Work, and Why Craft Remains Relevant
Winter 2024
This article examines the transformation of design work under the influence of managerialism and the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Drawing on John Maynard Keynes’s projections...
Foresight and Design: New Support for Strategic Decision Making
Autumn 2020
Decision makers who plan, decide, and act to influence change need to rely on a new, emerging approach to the future in the increasingly turbulent environments they face today. After reviewing the evidence...
Dealing with Wicked Problems: Normative Paradigms for Design Thinking
Winter 2024
Wicked problems, such as climate change, poverty, and antibiotic resistance, are ethical problems, as moral plurality about the social good is one of their constituting factors. Although wicked problems...
Ill-Defined Problems in Wicked Learning Environments
Winter 2024
Many of today’s global problems are complex and difficult to solve—some may even be impossible. They are characterized by interconnectedness, non-linear causality, and a lack of clear solutions or definitive...
Evaluating Aesthetic Experiences via Immersive Virtual Environments and EEG: Toward the Integration of Neuroscience Tools in Design Assessment
Spring 2026
The significance of aesthetic experiences in shaping human perception and interaction with spaces has long been acknowledged in art and design theory. While neuroscience research highlights the importance...
Frame Creation and Design in the Expanded Field
Autumn 2015
Design-trained people have access to a very broad range of professions. Yet there is something paradoxical about this development: ostensibly, many of these highly successful people have moved out of...
Rethinking Design Education
Summer 2023
This opening article for the special issue on the Future of Design Education traces paradigmatic shifts in design, from the twentieth-century mass production of artifacts to the twenty-first-century...
Design beyond Design
Summer 2019
As organizations struggle to respond to a world in which problems are becoming more open, complex and increasingly networked, many have turned to design thinking as a way to obtain solutions and achieve...
Revisiting “Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science?”—The Question of Quality in Communication Design
Summer 2022
In 1988, I published an article on the criteria for quality in communication design. This article revisits the issues I raised: performance, rather than style, should be the determining factor in assessing...
