Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring If Organisational Transformation Enhances Policy And Public Sector Innovation Labs Their Impact Potential: A Case Study On Zet, Jelske Van De Ven

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As experimental spaces, design-led Policy and Public Sector Innovation labs employ design and participatory practices to help governments innovate. However, their short-lived nature is often detrimental to informing policy processes and government practices systematically. A year-long case study on Zet, a Dutch PPSI lab, including 29 interviews and 2 workshops, explored how organisational transformation from a government-enabled to an independently-run lab acts as a sustaining strategy. This article focuses on how Zet’s organisational transformation affected their potential to inform policy and government practice. Findings reveal that Zet started to prefer long-term client partnerships over short-term assignments. In addition, knowledge of …

Shaping Public Sector Digital Transformation Through Design. Translation Approaches On Training Programs As Multi-Stakeholder Ecosystems, Ilaria Mariani, Giulia D'Aleo, Marzia Mortati, Francesca Rizzo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In the evolving landscape of public sector digital transformation, the integration of design thinking and stakeholder engagement presents a pressing challenge and a valuable opportunity. As a response to this challenge, there is a growing interest in the implementation of training programs within the theoretical framework of translational practices. This study adopts an organisational lens and an analytical framework to look into three instances of design translation in multi-stakeholder ecosystems. Drawing insights from a three-year exploration, it examines the dynamics within two ecosystems: the multidisciplinary and multi-operational partners responsible for designing and executing the training program, and the program participants. …

What Do Designers Bring To The Table? Identifying Key Design Competencies When Designing For Societal Challenges In The Public Sector, Thomas Van Arkel, Nynke Tromp

DRS Biennial Conference Series

There is an increasing interest in the public sector for the repertoire of designers and the value it can bring when working on complex societal challenges. However, what constitutes this repertoire is often not articulated clearly, or it is explained in such generic terms that it is hard to draw disciplinary boundaries. Drawing from literature, we identify four competencies—integrating, reframing, formgiving and orchestrating—as distinctive for the discipline of design. Through several examples we show how these competencies feature in the design process, and how these competencies drive different design practices. Although these competencies have to a certain extent always been …

Infrastructuring Sustainable Food Futures: A Case Study In Collaborative Innovation For Circular Seafood, Emmanuel Tsekleves, Serena Pollastri

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Transitioning to a circular economy requires transforming practices across the Ready-to-cook product value chains through shared knowledge. However, generalised solutions rarely succeed, but must be tailored to each context. This study explores using participatory design-informed “infrastructuring” to collaboratively develop novel methods tailored to stakeholders’ existing practices. The Seafood AGE project serves as a case study. We developed two remote, distributed facilitation methods using accessible digital platforms. These engage stakeholders in mapping current practices, analysing responses to speculative fish products, and exploring feasibility of prototypical circular approaches. Key findings demonstrate the potential of co-creative infrastructuring to bridge design research and industry. …

Designing Change: Research Scope And Agenda., Sabine Junginger, G. Mauricio Mejía, Luca Simeone

DRS Biennial Conference Series

No abstract provided.

Collaborative Translation From And Into Practice, Roger Whitham, David Pérez, Elizabeth Galvin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores how collaborative design methods can facilitate the translation of situated knowledge embodied in expert practice. We draw on a long-term collaborative research project with a major national museum in the UK aimed at catalysing sustained transformation in the practice of staff members. We describe two interdependent generative modalities of our collaborative design research intervention. Firstly, a mode of collaborative translation from staff member’s existing practice into shared language, prototypes and tools. Secondly, a mode of collaborative translation into the situated practice of staff, resulting in new shared behaviours and capabilities. We describe the methods used in this …

From Crisis To Transformation: The Role Of Creative Practices In Organisational Transitions, Milad Hajiamiri, Giulia Calabretta, Peter Lloyd, Fatma Korkut

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Organizational transitions can evoke a range of reactions and emotions among employees, departments, stakeholders, and leaders. To effectively manage the transition, it is crucial to comprehend how organizations experience and design change to navigate the various challenges of the transition process. This study investigates how changes in the working environment of the catering staff of a convention centre in the Netherlands led to the formation of a close-knit community that not only embraced the change but also developed innovative approaches for addressing local and social challenges. We draw on interviews with 16 individuals from the organization and use social practice …

Visioning And Managing Change: Analyzing Strategic Designers' Approaches In Salient Podcast Episodes, Ruchita Arvind Mandhre, G. Mauricio Mejía, Wenqi Zheng, Kendon Jung, Xueting Wu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Strategic design considers strategy as the core deliverable of practice, where designers are intentional about creating change. However, there is limited research that reveals change as a deliverable in these projects. The purpose of this study is to understand how experienced practitioners do strategic design and to identify their approaches for behavioral, organizational, and social change intentionally. With many experienced strategic designers invited to podcast shows, we analyzed the content of salient podcast episodes. This qualitative study uncovers themes, methods and approaches that expert strategic designers use to implement intentional change. We found that strategic designers embed themselves in particular …

Unleashing Creative Ideation Through Stakeholder-Related Learning: The Ripple Effect With Stakeholder-Nexus Tool, Ziling Liang, Zihan Zhou, Chu Liang, Yiming Bai, Yunxiang Shi, Yunfei Chen, Ying Hu

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Extensive learning and comprehensive consideration of the dynamic connections between stakeholders are the keys to tapping into novel insights, especially in service design. However, due to their lack of professional experience, novice designers usually struggle with the complicated network of stakeholders which results in incomplete design solutions. We created the Stakeholder-Nexus, a knowledge graph-based heuristic teaching tool based on reliable service design examples, to address this problem. By conducting pre-post comparison experiments, we revealed that using the tool significantly increased the effectiveness of stakeholder learning and ideation of design solutions yielded heightened creativity with increased appeal and improved feasibility. Furthermore, …

Fostering Design Research Labs For Public Sector Innovation, Andrea Augsten, Lynn Harles

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The public sector's digital transformation fosters collaboration and experimenta-tion, integrating design practices like design thinking, service design, and system design, notably in public innovation labs. Despite progress, these labs face chal-lenges in effecting change, transferring knowledge, and gaining cultural ac-ceptance. Public Innovation Labs (PIL) prioritize the common good, unlike profit-centric private counterparts. Design Research Labs (DRL), rooted in arts and de-sign, share this mission, offering a unique perspective on public sector innova-tion. Exploring the potential of DRLs in supporting public labs, this paper outlines criteria based on five DRLs in the German academic design context. It provides a new perspective …

Strategic Design Futures: Exploring Strategy And Futures To Learn And Practice Design For Intentional Change, G. Mauricio Mejía

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Designers change existing situations with a focus on changing the behavior of artifacts. When designers aim to intentionally change the behaviors of individuals, organizations, or social systems, practitioners use specific approaches. Strategy (strategic design) and futures (design futures) are two alternatives for designers working on complex situations that require intentional change. This paper presents and reports three editions of a course titled Strategic Design Futures that address this type of situation. The course includes a seminar and a project component, which are structured into six design activities: sense-making, participatory visioning, designing futures, designing strategy, participatory evaluation, and design implementation. The …

Historical Evolution Of Age-Friendly Transitions In The Yangfangdian Community In Beijing: A Multi-Level Perspective, Lijun Chen, Vladimír Kočí, Haipeng Tian

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The issue of transition and transformation of communities has a long history. Particularly in today's context of increasing aging trends, cities and communities are facing unprecedented multiple challenges that drive the transition to a more inclusive and sustainable future to enable community stakeholders to have a higher quality of life experience and to fulfil their visions for the future. This paper systemically reveals insights from the past of the ageing issue in the Yangfangdian community in Beijing through a multi- level perspective (MLP) framework created with local residents, a museum and design students to understand the historical foundations of the …

Extremes: On How The Study Of Appropriation Might Inform Inclusive Workplace Design In Manufacturing, Ana Correia De Barros

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Disabled people, from younger to older adults, are at comparative disadvantage regarding work. Design for inclusion at work tends to focus on individual adaptations (often stigmatising) or general accessibility guidelines (often insufficient). Furthermore, there is a tendency to focus on inability rather than on extreme abilities, which seem to be the ones enabling workers to appropriate existing products and create their own designs. Therefore, design research requires more input from diverse workers as users to inform the design inclusive industrial workstations. Departing from theory and ending with analyses of workers' designs, this paper argues that the articulation of the concept …

Three’S Company: Situation-Problem-Solution Co-Evolution, Luke Feast

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper reports the results of a study examining the co-evolution of design situations, problems, and solutions. The research method is a longitudinal study tracking the creative problem-solving processes of 4 MSc student design teams on an industrial design project. The data includes observations, interviews, field notes, and documents. Visual mapping and temporal bracketing analysis tech-niques reveal insights into the teams' design processes. The results provide evidence that integrating effectuation enabled some teams to pivot their projects by co-evolving the situation, problem, and solution spaces simultaneously. This finding suggests designers can shape situations through effectuation, rather than just passively respond …

Exploring The Role Of Design For Organizational Learning In Community Interactions, Lorenz Herfurth

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic regarding organizational learning between communities and public bodies by reviewing current literature and research studies. Public institutions interacted with a number of different communities, demographics and cultures during the pandemic. What used to be considered inclusive approaches to engagement fell short of reaching those communities most exposed to the health risks associated with working in a pandemic. This working paper presents research into different thematic spaces that explore organizational learning between institutions and communities, and the role design might play in stimulating or inhibiting trans-formation in these relationships. Informed by …

Enacting Sustainability-Centered Design Curricula: The Role Of Ethos In Translating Educational Goals Into Pedagogy., Charlotte Kessler, Janice Rieger

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The concept of sustainability ethos can be defined as a context enabling an articulated set of educational aims and values to translate into curricula and promote capabilities that empower graduates to create change towards sustainable futures. While emerging as an important factor in developing sustainability-centered design curricula, further research is required to fully comprehend its educational significance, and how it intersects with the prevailing outcome-based approach to higher education curriculum development. This paper draws from interviews with academics and graduate students from three sustainability-centered design programs internationally to explore what enabled sustainability to be integrated in the programs. The findings …

Framing Transitions: Scenarios And Design For The Strategic Redirection Of Companies Within Planetary Boundaries, Estelle Berger, Pierre-Baptiste Goutagny, Caroline Nowacki

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper provides experience feedback from a French consortium gathering academic and industrial partners, to produce quantified scenarios for 2060 that will serve to redirect companies within the frame of planetary boundaries. This setup constitutes a field for action research in design, together with strategic foresight, sustainability, and human and social sciences. Our paper presents the epistemological and methodological choices made, reports on the first year of the project (qualitative scenario-building), and the issues met. We propose in particular to discuss the tension between global societal evolutions driven by macro trends, and the situated processes of transformation initiated by the …

Reframing Design Maturity: A New Perspective On The Development Of Design In Public Organizations, Geert Brinkman, Ahmee Kim

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Although design is a core activity of public organizations, the dominant perspective to this day is that public organizations are void of design. Existing design maturity models based on this perspective thus do not reflect, nor do justice to the practice of design in public organizations. In this conceptual paper we therefore propose to reframe design maturity as a matter of versatility and alignment - i.e. as an organization’s ability to tailor their design activities to the different design tasks it faces, while establishing productive interactions with other concurrent design activities. This offers a new perspective on how design can …

Prototyping As A Translational Practice Within Cross-Organizational B2b Service Innovation, Jaana Hyvärinen, Tuuli Mattelmäki

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper focuses on service prototyping in a global B2B technology company experimenting with the B2C market. We first establish the research framework with existing literature on service prototyping and then report a case in which service prototypes and prototyping approaches were used to contribute to different phases of a new service development project: a) discover and define, b) develop and deliver and c) implementation and rollout. We then reflect on the role of prototyping as a translational practice in facilitating cross-organizational collaboration and aligning and enhancing the commitment of various stakeholders. The first author, with a dual role of …

Navigating University Of Denver As A Latinx Male-Identifying Undergraduate Student, Quisi Rodriguez-Oregel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Students of color continuously persist at a lower rate than their white counterparts in higher education. Particularly for Latinx males, the number is lower than Latinx women. Universities have incorporated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) strategies to focus on their diverse student population and address issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Despite these efforts, low retention rates for Latinx males persist. This study explores how Latinx male undergraduate students navigate a predominantly white institution as well as explore some of the challenges of DEI efforts at that institution. I conducted participant observations at the University of Denver (DU) and …

A Study And Critique Of Sexual Violence Against Disabled Individuals In Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications For Policy And Practice Of Trauma-Informed Care, Kaeley Sells

Lux et Fides: A Journal for Undergraduate Christian Scholars

This paper examines and critiques current sexual violence against disabled individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa by evaluating the social and cultural stigma present that perpetuates cycles of vulnerabilities. Currently, women and girls with disabilities are disproportionally at risk for sexual violence as economic, cultural, and political structures in many Sub-Saharan African countries fail to recognize and adequately protect those with disabilities. Incorporating evidence from journals, books, reviews, and studies, this paper demonstrates the need for non-government and government actors to recognize the need to provide protection and trauma-informed care for disabled individuals.

A Study Of Followership In An Organizational-Wide Change Of The Ministry Of Child Evangelism Fellowship, Michelle M. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The influence of Child Evangelism Fellowship saw a significant increase across the United States of America after an organizational change following a 2001 Supreme Court case ruling. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the role of followership on the change and followership principles that emerged during the change that was implemented following the ruling Good News Club v. Milford Central School on the Good News Club ministry of Child Evangelism Fellowship. Organizational change was defined as intentional actions promoted by leadership and intentional actions taken by followers who took advantage of the rights guaranteed by the ruling. …

One Stitch At A Time: Examining The Self-Care Of Art Therapists And The Potential Of Fiber Arts For Wellbeing, Elaine Chippero

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

The goal of this thesis was to understand why art therapists are particularly at risk for burnout, why it is essential for art therapists to engage artmaking for their own self-care, and why fiber crafts are particularly suited for self-care. The literature was collected and organized using reflective journaling and visual–tactile coding and then presented in the following review. The first two sections of the literature review include comprehensive definitions of burnout and self-care and how both concepts have been discussed in literature relating to the helping professions and specifically art therapists. The third section covers the historical context of …

Challenging The Cancer Of Consumerism Ravaging The American Protestant Church, John A. Thompson Ii

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The American Protestant church is sick and, in some cases, dying. The primary factors adversely influencing the church contribute to church members’ warped view of Christianity. The American church is suffering from individualism, consumerism, and uncommitted Christianity. The church may be described as critically ill, and in the I.C.U. The purpose of this study was to address the effects of this cultural illness as it has impacted the people and ministry of Kingdom Life Community Church. This topic is chosen because of the researcher’s experience serving as the church’s lead pastor, observing members approach the church with a consumer bias. …

Expressive Therapies And Resiliency – Resistance In Mental Health: A Literature Review, Gabrielle Lopez

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This review evaluates the current literature on psychological resistance amongst human service professionals experiencing burnout and the effect of Expressive Arts interventions on resiliency. Concepts include identifying the main symptoms, risk factors, causes, and treatments for burnout in education faculty, medical staff, and clinicians. Qualitative, quantitative, and meta-analysis studies are included to identify the most prevalent intervention frameworks for reducing stress including Arts-Based and Mindfulness-compassion based techniques. The effectiveness of Arts-based tools on strengthening identity, self-esteem, emotional regulation, and meaning-making in combating burnout is presented. Based on analysis of the literature, the author proposes a three-step intervention framework for utilizing …

Faculty And "Teams": Academic Literacies In The Post-Lockdown, Digital University., Morgan Suzanne Blair

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The increased presence of disruptive digital technologies in academia has been a subject of multidisciplinary scholarly conversation and public speculation over the past few decades. Many literacy studies scholars have contributed to this discourse, examining topics like multimodal literacies and perceptions of agency among students. These scholars have noted with skepticism that such technologies may mask operations of power, surveillance, and control which serve the demands of an increasingly “corporate” or “neoliberal” university. Building upon this scholarship, my study contends that the evolving literacy environment of the digital university requires a closer examination of corporate-sponsored narratives and literacy practices implicating …

The Use Of Whole Blood In Increasing The Survivability Of Combat Wounded Troops From 1940 To 1953, Devin Sweet

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Humans have been experimenting with new ways to kill each other for millennia, and for just as long, doctors have been experimenting with methods to improve survivability of those wounded. The 20^th century was one of the bloodiest period in human history; war claimed over one hundred million lives. With the scourge of disease more easily managed, the medical communities came to address the one wound that historically cost most lives – bleeding to death. Shock and exsanguination can kill a person within thirty seconds to two minutes, and finding ways to mitigate that outcome has been the subject …

Civil Service Merit And Employment At Will Personnel Systems: The Role Of Transformational Change Leadership In Public Sector Recruitment, Hiring, Promotion, Retention, And Succession Planning, Angela Lauria-Gunnink

Dissertations

Purpose: This nonexperimental, descriptive, and comparative study aimed to identify and describe the differences between Public Sector HR Association (PSHRA) professionals who worked in a state or local government civil service merit or employment at will (EAW) personnel system.

Methodology: This nonexperimental, descriptive, and comparative study identified and described the responses of 214 state and local government PSHRA professionals throughout the United States, focusing on their respective personnel systems. The researcher collected data and tabulated descriptive statistics and z scores to compare and statistically determine the differences between the two public sector personnel systems.

Findings: The 214 PSHRA professionals who …

The Blurry Line Between Corporation And Cult: A Retrospective Autoethnographic Study, Ernst Graamans

The Qualitative Report

In popular management literature corporations are sometimes loosely compared to cults. The comparison is a severe allegation as it implies the transgression of subordinate employees’ integrity. This paper explores to what extent such comparisons with cults are warranted as well as the implications this has for the practice of corporate culture management. On grounds of the author’s unique, first-hand experience in both corporate and cultic environments a retrospective autoethnographic (RAE) approach was chosen to further explore the supposed resemblance. The comparison is structured along Lifton’s eight criteria of thought reform and reveals that although akin to cults in all aspects …

Emulating Paul’S Ministry Leadership In A Diverse And Changing Cultural Landscape, Mark J. Lee

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this Doctor of Ministry project is to train ministry leaders by studying the cross-cultural leadership characteristics of Apostle Paul. Central Steele Creek Presbyterian Church is part of the sad statistic of traditional churches that have been declining for the past thirty years. This will continue unless leaders of the church embrace the diverse culture and nature of the surrounding community. Cross-cultural leadership is needed in this time of multi-cultural communities and there is no one better than Paul to demonstrate this indispensable cross-cultural ministry paradigm. If leaders at Central are trained and motivated to embrace Paul’s cross-cultural …