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...
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...
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...
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...
Confronting Complexity: A Design Guide for System-Level Investors
Summer 2026
For most investors, the function of investing is to offset future liabilities, such as retirement. Yet, most investors define success as “beating a benchmark,” rather than funding the future. That misalignment,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Redesigning Value: How Designers and Managers Can Work Together for a Better World
Summer 2026
Designers and managers both seek to redesign value in ways that serve both societal and business goals. However, they often struggle to work together. In interviews with designers and managers, we observed...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
Crafting Sustainable Futures: The Role of Prefigurative Design-Led Approaches in Open Innovation Platforms
Spring 2026
Sustainability issues in makerspaces stem from the unstructured nature of rapid prototyping and the lack of frameworks that bridge ethical, ecological, and social concerns. This study investigates how...
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...
What Role Can Design Play in Enabling Missions to Emerge as an Alternative Investment Logic in Public Innovation Systems?
Summer 2026
Mission design, as a novel suite of design practices, demonstrates how design can act as a structuring logic for large-scale sustainability transitions. Using collaborative design as a mechanism for...
Capital Design: Asset Classes as Design Objects
Summer 2026
Institutional investors rely on inherited asset class taxonomies that simplify decision-making but constrain holistic portfolio thinking. This article introduces Capital Design, a researcher-practitioner...
Design and Capital: Editorial Introduction
Summer 2026
