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Design schools around the world often state that they offer instruction on topics such as sustainability, inclusive design, and responsible design. Fifty years ago, design scholar Victor Papanek had already begun teaching industrial designers that they were contributing to consumerism by designing unnecessary gadgets. Papanek urged them to offer more responsible solutions to the real difficulties that people face daily, difficulties that spanned a range of problems from physical challenges to societal ones. His works were not appreciated—at all—by his American industrial designer contemporaries, but still served as powerful inspiration to European design academics whose efforts comprise some of the first PhD work on design. Here I describe Papanek’s writing and inspiration, and note how long it took before influential design academics would seek to educate and inspire others based on his work. I have served as dean at three universities where his legacy lives on in teaching and research. I will reflect on some of the recent activities taking place under Papanek’s influence at these institutions, and offer a personal perspective of these developments, and some reflections on the progress in light of Papanek’s lessons overall.

Strategic design is a driver for innovation that can lead to sustainable competitive advantage. Over the past two decades, the barriers limiting breakthrough strategic design development have been studied in much detail. However, that research is based on well-developed practices in Europe, where strategic design and innovation capabilities have been nurtured for a long period. Barriers to the adoption of strategic design practices and leadership have seldom been studied in high growth economies in which design and innovation competencies are not yet mature. We examined design-led innovation cases from Chinese design clients and consultancies, and uncovered twelve barriers to strategic design practice and leadership in China. Six of these are similar to hindrances experienced elsewhere, and the other six are unique to this study. We found that in China, certain constraints limiting the adoption of strategic design in practice exist in the environment outside the firm. Based on these findings, we offer suggestions to stakeholders for overcoming the barriers to utilizing design at the strategic level. Key words: Breakthrough innovation, Design-led innovation, Design implementation, Strategic design

In this paper we examine publication patterns in peer-reviewed journals that publish design research. Our data consists of 4727 articles and their citations as published in 11 journals over a ten-year period (2000–2009). These 11 journals are classified as either design-related or design-focused, depending on whether they specialize in design research or related disciplines. Our research findings suggest that the research community publishing in design-related journals is, for the larger part, made up of different institutions and scholars than the research community focusing on design-focused journals. The design-focused journals seem to be less impactful than the design-related journals. Top authors from the design-focused community tend to publish more papers in the design-related journals than the other way around.