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Design is increasingly deployed by governments and cities to address social and policy-related problems and to develop public services and organizations towards more citizen centeredness. Design activities in complex and hierarchic public organizations easily meet challenges, making their impact elusive. More knowledge is needed on the organizational requisites of public sector design. This article provides an empirical analysis of the challenges and opportunities of embedding design in a large public organization, as perceived by fourteen city officials. The case organization, City of Helsinki, has been a pioneer in using design at the strategic level and using it widely in its organization. The results show that differences between the design field and the public sector not only offer complementarities but also create friction in the practical utilization of design. Moreover, the discontinuity and fragmentation of design activities, the highly variable maturity levels within the city organization, the integration of design into projects, and more encompassing leadership, change management, and implementation of the results of design projects were seen as future development areas.

Design is increasingly used to develop public services, and considerations have arisen regarding how to gain best value from it. Design ladders and design maturity models are commonly referenced also in the public sector, but we argue that their adequate use must rest on an informed view of the diversity of design activities in the public sector organizations. The world’s major cities are large and highly diversified organizations. Our case study of one of them, the city of Helsinki, reveals 23 distinct types of design activities, distinct in terms of the process, outcomes, and agency that design has. These activities can be grouped into six different clusters. These lay the ground for each other and support the cultural transformation of the organization towards being a more citizen-centric organization. At the same time, they also create a design management challenge and confusion over what “design” is and what it can do.

An ever-growing number of scholars are developing and applying competency frameworks in the context of sustainability education. Despite the strong interest, most of the research has ignored the varying meanings of competency, which can be interpreted as a performed ability, but also as personality development. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) recently suggested self-awareness to be a central sustainability competency. However, the sustainability competency discourse is lacking a thorough analysis of how and if personality development related dispositions can be considered as competencies, how can they be taught in higher education, and how can the potentially transformative experiences resulting from such teaching be considered. This article aims at a deep understanding of the concept of self-awareness and its interpretations. We have reviewed the roots and analyzed the current interpretations of self-awareness in sustainability competency research and explored how the competency frameworks connect to transformative learning. In addition, we give tangible examples from art based and creative practices of design education, in which we have examined how self-awareness is defined and how it connects to transformative learning. The interpretations of self-awareness addressed two perspectives: awareness of oneself and awareness of one’s relation to others and a wider society. Based on our research, becoming self-aware is a process that nourishes transformative learning. We additionally understand self-awareness as a process of internal growth instead of only a performable ability. This needs to be considered when developing the sustainability competency frameworks and their applications in education.

In the last decade, co-design and co-creation are terms that appear widely in scientific literature, in professional magazines, websites of product development companies, design research and market research agencies and even public organisations’ reports. We have noticed that the terms are often tangled. The objective of this paper is to clarify the relationship of co-design and co-creation in the context of design and design research. We aim to make sense of the background and use of the terms to show similarities and differences between them. We review literature and discuss recent cases to demonstrate the spectrum of co-X. Our main aim is to clarify the co-terms for our design students in the rapidly evolving design research field.

Our inner, invisible dimension consisting of our values, mental models and worldviews, has been identified as a significant leverage point for transformational change, as it brings to life our actions. Accordingly, the inner dimension of sustainability has a major role in transitioning towards desirable and sustainable futures. This paper focuses on exploring what kind of methods and competences are needed to access and work with the inner dimension as part of collaborative design practices aiming for sustainable and deep change. Thus, a lesser researched, alternative perspective to design discourse, the awareness-based co-creation approach is highlighted as a potential and emerging direction for design for sustainability. By thinking across: (1) literature findings of the concept of inner dimension of sustainability; (2) existing knowledge of awareness-based transformation approaches and (3) results of an experimental case study done in the context of nature tourism, it was recognized that more examples are needed on how to enable, promote and capture participants’ transformative experiences. Finally, the argument is made that awareness-based competencies should be considered as essential future skills and competences of design for sustainability.

This paper focuses on the connections and resonances between an ethical and philosophical concept of care and service design. The paper contributes, on one hand, to discussions on service design seen as a dynamic discipline that addresses relations and responsibilities when shaping our futures. On the other, it highlights the concept of care in our everyday choices, and how it matters in learning context. We first frame our take on service design and our motivation to recalibrate the focus on human-centred design by enhancing, with the concept of care, the understanding of interconnectedness. Then, we introduce, based on literature, three lenses to view the everyday manifestations of care through different perspectives and horizontal depths. We also introduce an experiment within a university course on service design where we included an additional, value-based layer, on ‘care’. The three lenses are then used in discussing and students’ learning reflections and design outcomes, as well as the potential and challenges of the experiment as a transformative experience. Based on our observations, we propose that care as a concept can support in bringing deeper understanding on interrelatedness to service design education.

User-centred design is a widely acknowledged practice. Much attention has been put into methods, tools, and processes on how to collect information, insights and stories from users. Currently, more and more effort is invested into engaging various stakeholders in collaborative design efforts and nurturing an attitude of human centeredness as a strategy. This attitude addresses design empathy, which is the ability to step into another person’s shoes and looking at the world from that perspective. The objective of this paper is to illustrate and discuss different kind of formats that can be used to communicate representations of user study/field findings and insights in a way that can be open ended for new interpretations and allow and inspire personal insights. The paper describes several examples in which the issue has been addressed.

This paper investigates the role of empathy and the use of service design tools in the context of (governmental) systems and organisational services. The discourse focuses on three areas: intercultural empathy, the empathising process and empathic design tools. The paper first reviews what empathy is and how it has been discussed in design. Secondly, a practical example of a complex design context is presented, an interactive platform for governmental immigration services. To best acknowledge the perspective of one, i.e. an individual in the whole, this example proposes that a combination of different design tools can systematically be applied, to foster perspective changes and to facilitate in zooming in and out from the individual to systemic levels.