The purpose of this paper is to examine how design works at the level of strategy. Through analyses of the practices of five design consulting firms in Denmark, it explores how designers become part of strategy formation in the first place, the types of strategic work they undertake, and what design skills and knowledge they utilize in the making of strategy. The findings suggest that designers engage in strategy-level work in multiple domains ranging from redefinition of existing strategies to building unique organizational competencies to setting corporate vision by developing future scenarios.

Collaborating with public or private sector organizations in project-based courses equips design students with key skills to future-proof their careers, but this gives only one side of the story as the key feature of these partnerships is that they are mutualistic collaborations. However, the benefits to organizations of collaborating are not fully explored. This paper presents a case study of partnerships with four different public organizations in a service design course over a five-year period. It argues that collaborating in project-based courses serves as risk-free experimentation and paves the way for organizational learning. The paper first reviews the existing research on collaboration in design education and organizational learning. Then, three types of learning that emerged from the data are analyzed. Next, the steps to successful collaboration are discussed, noting the ups and downs of managing the project partnerships. Finally, the challenges of teaching a collaborative project-based design course are discussed.

It is often argued that design serves as an effective change agent in strategy formation. However, the question of how this actually occurs remains largely unexplored. Through case studies of five design consulting firms in Denmark, this paper examines how design gets involved in the making of strategy. The findings show that there are at least two paths to strategy-level work: First, design works its way to strategizing through repeated client engagement and trust building. That is, design consulting firms work with the same client over a long period of time, they gain trust of their clients, so the complexity and strategic importance of their deliverables gradually increase. Second, design consulting firms use human-centered approach as a means for reviewing the business strategy of their clients. That is, user research brings user needs, problems and opportunities into focus, which, in turn, paves the way for strategy-level discussions and solution seeking. Each path is discussed in terms of issues in design management, including, but not limited to, design activities, competence building in design firms and organizational structures.

Municipalities around the world have become increasingly reliant upon digital technologies in their everyday operations. In pursuit of a faster, cheaper, and more efficient local government, service platforms and applications that mediate citizen-government inter- actions, smart city infrastructures, and automated decision-making systems have proliferated. More recently, digital technologies are also sought to address socially complex issues and foster civic en- gagement. These ambitions, motivated by both rational and demo- cratic perspectives, however, confront many challenges such as de- signing with wide heterogeneous groups, navigating organizational structures, and dealing with the political agendas and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholders. Designing digital technolo- gies for municipalities, therefore, requires an ability to address the technical, social, institutional, and political challenges critically, practically, and holistically. This hybrid workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to (1) explore how this could be achieved and (2) map the existing and emerging challenges and opportunities for designing public digital services and technologies.

Public sector organizations have been increasingly turning to design in their pursuit to innovate and address pressing challenges that seem intractable through their existing ways of working. Design’s presence in the public sector is still a relatively recent phenomenon ridden with many challenges. Through a study of three municipalities in Sweden, we present tensions designers face as they work their way to build design capacity. We argue that making a place for design in organizational systems and their ways of working requires skillfully navigating these tensions. We describe each tension in terms of their contradictions embedded in dualities and discuss designers’ ways of managing them. Practical applications for design and public administration are also discussed.

Design and the Creation of Value' publishes for the first time his groundbreaking seminar on design and economic value. In remarkably clear and accessible prose Heskett explores the how the key traditions of economic thought conceive of how value is created. Critically teasing out the role of design in this process, Heskett shows how design's role in innovating and creating value creating value for organisations and products can be given a firm grounding in economic theory. Featuring examples of businesses which have successfully responded to the value of design in their practice, as well as others who have failed because of their inability to understand value-creation, Heskett looks in detail at the relationship between producers, markets, products and consumers, using these instances to offer a both a strong critique of the limitations conventional economic thought and new model of the economic importance of design thinking in value creation. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/design-and-the-creation-of-value-9781474274302/#sthash.Y5mJ13ze.dpuf

Longstanding practices of participatory co-design have sought to engage communities in the development of shared resources, services, and technologies. However, approaches such as citizen-centered design and digital civics bring these design methods to bear on the development of digital technologies in support of civic and third sector organizations in particularly complex and rapidly changing socio-technical landscapes. Such endeavors frequently need to engage marginalized, under-served and hard to reach communities. In these design spaces, the ‘Digital Citizen’ becomes a contested concept, deserving of deeper exploration. In this one-day workshop we seek to bring together the DIS community, industry practitioners and third sector representatives to mutually explore the concept of the digital citizen, its boundaries, and opportunities, and in response to a rapidly changing environment of smart digital services, the ways in which design methods might be evolved to better support designing for and with these digital citizens.