Journal of Design, Business & Society - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2020

Community-engaged design is often framed as a binary opposite to commercial design. Whereas commercial design is usually characterized as a market-led paradigm focused on profits, community-engaged design is seen as a socially useful design paradigm that is concerned with addressing societal needs. This study uses qualitative data from four design project case studies to explore whether this understanding is in fact consistent with current design practices within commercial design studios. The findings of this study demonstrate that both commercial and community-engaged design practices are more similar than different. In addition, it is also suggested that it is not only the clients’ instructions and the commissions that determine the designers’ processes and practices, but the design studios’ intent, practice and values. This study has a number of practical implications for designers and design studios in how they address commercial and community-engaged design work.

Contemporary societies are distancing themselves from nature, driven by urbanization, biodiversity loss, connection loss, industrialization and loss of green space access – all reducing our empathy for nature. Conservation and grassroots reporting highlight nature’s wellbeing, and require impactful citizen-led responses. Youth leaders are reflecting mirrors on humankind, stating that ‘our world is on fire’ and demanding action. Natural world interactions provide health benefits and resilience, proving transformative to our attitude, values and behaviour. The My Naturewatch project facilitates engagements with people’s environments and, in doing so, helps them to comprehend them. Nature observations help connect, engage and foster custodians, at a time where separation from wildlife necessitates active engagement. Activities specifically challenge our understanding of ‘designed engagement(s)’, not as passive activities but as impactful active engagements, openly accessible. This article proposes criteria encouraging public participation within the natural world, presenting value to NGOs, designers, funders and agents. Thirty experts from design, ecology, conservation, museology, engagement, rewilding, wildlife and community work were interviewed, informing ‘design for environmental change through active engagement’. The work identifies design’s role in creating interventions that better engage people with the surrounding natural world, yielding long-term mutual benefits. The objective is to foster active public–nature engagement, identifying barriers, opportunities and pitfalls in nature-engaged interaction(s).

Emerging design is an approach to solving multidimensional and multidisciplinary problems. It describes design as an evolutionary activity with no projected steps, in which plans for taking steps and using tools gradually emerge from participants’ reflections. This study explores emerging design through a three-year activity that initially had a pedagogical nature but gradually turned into a practical and research-based activity in which design students along with small businesses and start-ups came up with a problem-based approach for defining and solving real-world problems. The three cycles of activity were studied with a reflective lens and various sources of data were used. The Engeström framework for activity theory was used to reduce and display data in qualitative data analysis. Through the three cycles of activity, few design proposals were implemented by the involved small businesses and start-ups. In addition, most businesses benefited from the research findings produced during the students’ projects. Some unexpected outcomes were also observed, including emergence of a collaborative network of experts and clients. The results suggest that first, the quality of collaboration among the participants was more important than instruments and rules for achieving the main objectives of the activity. Second, a reflective approach to design practice can continuously improve the design processes and tools used in each cycle of the activity, and third, design practice does not only produce design solutions, it also creates collaborations, reflections and networks.

As design has been slowly embraced as an element of business research, a number of well-established organizational strategy concepts have been called into question. This article empirically examines the relationship between firm performance and market orientation (MO), one of the most commonly employed variables within business strategy, among design-driven firms. Our findings suggest that the positive relationship between MO and performance present in most business strategy literature does not appear to hold among organizations with a strong strategic focus on design. Design-driven firms seem to actively downplay MO, resulting in a statistically significant negative relationship between the concept and its three sub-factors: customer orientation (CUST), competitor orientation (COMP), and inter-functional coordination (INTER) on two measures of firm performance, project-level success and competitive advantage. Drawing on related literature and follow-up interviews with firm managers, we rationalize these results as evidence of design-driven firms efforts to avoid the so-called ‘tyranny of the served market’ where a narrow focus on current customers and established competitors within incremental markets can lead to myopia and limit innovation. The implications of this study may be to provide support to managers of design-driven organizations to de-emphasize MO’s narrow focus on close industry rivals and well-defined customers as well as much-needed empirical support for anecdotal accounts of how many traditional business strategy variables, such as MO, may be insufficient, or at least incomplete explanations of design-driven organizations.

This article addresses the role of social innovation in ageing communities. Two cases are considered, namely the Life 2.0 project that focuses on generating information and communication technology services for ageing individuals and groups across Europe, while the second case is a project that was conducted with the BoAi aged care facility in China in which food services were (re)designed through insights stemming from the community. A comparative analysis will investigate how ageing communities collaboratively work with stakeholders, including designers and other professionals, to develop new services with the elderly. The comparative analysis presents insights into the role of ageing communities in service design processes and their roles as co-creators in new futures.