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,...
A Large Pension Fund Embracing the Systems Perspective: An Investment Case Study on PFZW and PGGM’s Journey
Summer 2026
This article is a case study, written from the inside, of one of the largest pension funds in the world, PFZW, from the Netherlands. It focuses on the process used to transform the company into one...
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...
Contributors
Summer 2026
The Asset Owner Gearbox: Why Investment Innovation Grinds and How to Make It Turn
Summer 2026
Asset owners—defined here as pensions, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and foundations—face transformative pressures as AI, automation, and other autonomous systems reshape market structures, investment...
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...
Shared Conceptions in Capital Design: Co-creation and Co-evolution in Asset Allocation
Summer 2026
Capital design is a nascent discipline that reconceives institutional asset allocation as a design practice rather than a static optimization exercise. Traditional finance treats asset allocation as...
Holistic Design for Sociotechnical System Transitions: Method and Instructional Setting Implementation in Engineering Education
Summer 2026
This article presents the pedagogical translation and exploratory implementation of a holistic approach to sociotechnical transition design in engineering education. A review of complex adaptive system...
Design and Capital: Editorial Introduction
Summer 2026
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...
The Impact of Design on the Modernization of Finland
Spring 2026
This article examines the impact of design on the modernization of Finland. The international breakthrough of Finnish design in the 1950s marks a period of aesthetic modernization of the country. In...
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...
Contributors
Spring 2026
Unmaking Ready-Made Futures of the DIY Chair
Spring 2026
This article explores the concept of “ready-made futures” through the lens of the DIY chair to examine the consequences that arise when industrial design aligns with capitalism. Initially conceived...
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...
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...
Contributors and Acknowledgment to Referees 2025
Winter 2025
“Back to the Future”: Making the Future Organizational Space from Experience to Imagination and Back
Winter 2025
This article explores how the experience of organizational space shapes the enactment of imagined futures of work. While research on future-making emphasizes the value of imagining multiple distant...
Letter to the Editor
Winter 2025
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...
Resensing Visions: A Convivial Approach to Future-Making from a Global South Context in Hermosillo, Mexico
Winter 2025
Visioning—the act of imagining futures—plays a crucial role in design, projecting possibilities, desires, and intentional directions into the future. Yet visioning methods face significant limitations,...