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This article reflects on a series of experiments conducted within a Danish master’s program geared towards design futuring. These experiments explored designerly ways to welcome otherness, i.e., diverse viewpoints, needs, and ways of being. Our findings suggest that our mind journeys between a habitual state of self-centeredness and a state that is more open to embracing otherness. Design futuring education should focus on cultivating mindsets that are passionate about otherness, as they hold the potential to challenge self-centeredness and accompanying notions of narrow-mindedness and short-termism.

Emerging digital technology could enable communities to benefit from the diversity of their members mutually. This chapter explores the process of designing a chatbot application aiming to mediate people interaction through diversity-aware algorithms. In particular, we focus on designing a specific chatbot application that builds on the diversity of university students—the envisioned end-users—to accommodate their diverse needs and preferences while leveraging the diversity represented in their community.

‘Strategic agility’– i.e., how organizations can strategically plan and cope with uncertainty through a continuous tuning, monitoring, and re-balancing of their opera- tions – has been characterized as a critical component to foster organizational resili- ence. This paper aims at investigating whether and how design can support organiza- tions to acquire greater strategic agility. Our analysis is grounded in a case of a globally operating software company that has recently established a design team and intro- duced design methods in its development processes. The paper shows how design fa- voured processes that are generally linked to strategic agility (distancing, anticipating, reframing, experimenting, decoupling, and dialoguing). Taken together, these pro- cesses were key in building the strategic agility needed in transitioning from a product- centric orientation towards a user- and service-centred approach.

This paper aims to foster a paradox lens on competing demands to ensure their productive engagement in design. Competing demands are inevitable and ubiquitous features of today’s systems. Thus, being subject to competing demands is a pervasive and inherent feature of designerly work. Drawing from organizational studies, we first outline four main streams of competing demands underlying today’s systems; related to time, cognition, social interactions, and focus. We demonstrate the importance of a purposeful conceptualization of competing demands by exemplifying how different conceptualizations can lead to different responses. We suggest employing a paradox lens on competing demands, which stresses that seemingly contradictory or even mutually exclusive factors can and ought to coexist and therefore should be leveraged simultaneously. Through a series of research-through-design experiments we explore how framing competing demands according to paradoxes impacts the way they are approached in design practice, and how paradoxes can be engagedwith through design.

Within design research, several studies have looked at Artificial Intelligence as a tool to help ideation processes. However, the potential of using Artificial Intelligence to support a specific characteristic of the design process, namely the interplay between divergent and convergent thinking, remains underexplored. Aiming to ad- dress this gap, this paper examines how 136 students interacted with Artificial Intelligence on the occasion of two courses run by the authors in a prominent European design school.

The process of value creation cannot be an exclusive preserve of designers, but it is rather the result of a diffuse problem solving capability. The creation of new value is also connected to the concept of innovation and can happen in different logical contexts, from limited and confined contexts (niches) to consolidated structures (regimes) and to wider sociotechnical contexts (landscapes). In all those contexts, design can have a different role and whoever designs should use different capabilities and tools. Furthermore, design capabilities can also be useful when aligning value creation and change in different levels, thus contributing to understand the relationships between small scale interactions and wider scale transformation of sociotechnical landscapes. This paper proposes a framework to understand the contribution of design to the value creation process at the three levels, focusing on design capabilities and tools to work across different logical contexts

This chapter presents some considerations on the Open4Citizens research project, which adopts design strategies to foster the use of open data and to support the creation of related communities and practices. The intent of the project is, therefore, to operate within the complex area of social change. The chapter will look into the design strategies implemented by Open4Citizens to address this complexity through multi-layered interventions ranging from the organisation of extended hackathon-centred processes in five piloting locations to the definition of a network of OpenDataLabs.

This paper presents an introductory review of methods to articulate strategy in design. Articulation is here seen as a process in which strategy is more or less strictly and explicitly identified and described, e.g. in relation to key ideas, directions to follow, goals and expected results. The paper surveys existing literature in design research and identifies two broad categories of methods for the articulation of strategy: (1) structured frameworks, and (2) vocabularies and principles.

Service design is a relatively young multidisciplinary field and in the past two decades has gained more attention in both the service industry and academia. Even though service design programmes are still not evenly widespread around the world, they are growing and expanding (mostly in Europe). These programmes are provided by different institutions - ranging from design faculties, all the way up to business and management schools - and differ as regards their curricula. This short paper explores this diversity by looking into a curated selection of master's degrees in service design and their curricula, by discussing the initial findings and by hinting at possibilities for future studies

This is a conference abstract entitled 'Best Practices in Serious Games: Gamification Strategies to Support Public Participation in Citizen Observatories' presented at the 2nd International Conference on Citizen Observatories for Natural Hazards and Water Management in Venice, Italy, between 27 and 30 November 2018.&nbsp

This short paper summarizes the outcomes of an analysis aimed at identifying a set of best practices in serious games, which can support public participation in citizen observatories.