P03 SIG Design-Led Approaches for Public Management

Panel chairs

Corresponding and review chair:

Geert Brinkman, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands: brinkman@essb.eur.nl

Co-chairs:

• Thomas van Arkel, TU Delft, Netherlands
• William Voorberg, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands
• Scott Schmidt, Georgetown University, USA
• Sabine Junginger, Northumbria University, UK    

Call for abstracts

Public organizations are increasingly confronted with societal issues where environmental, social, technological, and governance challenges interact and interrelate in unpredictable ways. More and more, they find themselves operating in environments characterized by crisis, complexity, and conflict. As public organizations struggle to address these issues and navigate these environments, awareness is growing that traditional approaches to policy design and service delivery alone are not enough, prompting a search for alternatives (Ansell et al., 2024).

Against this backdrop, transdisciplinary design - i.e. transdisciplinary research enacted through design-led approaches - has gained significant interest in the public sector in recent years (van der Bijl-Brouwer, 2022). Transdisciplinary design offers practices that facilitate collaborative sensemaking, reflexive reframing, and iterative experimentation, thus helping diverse societal actors develop shared understandings, explore complex interdependencies, identify opportunities for action, and develop adaptive responses to evolving circumstances. Accordingly, it is widely regarded as holding significant promise to collectively explore new pathways towards more just and sustainable futures.

For this reason, public organizations across the globe are increasingly engaging with transdisciplinary design. Yet, despite its popularity, evidence of its impact remains limited. Instead, it is often noted that its potential is yet to be fulfilled, and doing so requires either adapting the practice of transdisciplinary design itself or transforming the public sector (Kim et al., 2024). This raises questions concerning the barriers and challenges that complicate transformative design in the public sector as well as the capacities and conditions that facilitate it.

Hence, this panel aims to advance our understanding of how transdisciplinary design can help public organizations navigate the polycrisis, address wicked problems, and take on grand challenges. Specifically, it invites empirical and conceptual contributions at the intersection of public administration and design science that engage with the following topics:

• Potentials and pitfalls of transdisciplinary design: the contributions, limitations, and unintended consequences of transdisciplinary design in addressing complex societal issues and fostering societal transformation.
• Barriers and challenges to transdisciplinary design: the practical, relational, organizational, and institutional tensions and frictions that arise when engaging with transdisciplinary design in the public sector.
• Capacities and conditions for transdisciplinary design: the resources, capabilities, and arrangements required to enable transdisciplinary design.
• Management and governance of transdisciplinary design: the orchestration of transdisciplinary design across organizational, sectoral, disciplinary, and societal boundaries.
• Power and politics of transdisciplinary design: the interplay of power relations, competing interests, value negotiations, and participation dynamics that shape transdisciplinary design.

We hope to bring together a diverse group of participants to exchange knowledge, experiences, and perspectives, and advance our collective understanding of how to meaningfully engage with transdisciplinary design in the public sector. We welcome submissions from researchers and practitioners from around the world and at various career stages.

References

Ansell, C., Sørensen, E., Torfing, J., & Trondal, J. (2024). Robust governance in turbulent times. Cambridge University Press.

Lang, D.J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M. et al. Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: practice, principles, and challenges. Sustain Sci 7 (Suppl 1), 25–43 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-011-0149-x 

Kim, A., van der Bijl-Brouwer, M., Mulder, I., & Lloyd, P. (2024). Stabilizing Design Practices in Local Government. International Journal of Design, 18(3), 45-59. https://doi.org/10.57698/v18i3.04

van der Bijl-Brouwer, M. (2022) Design, one piece of the puzzle: A conceptual and practical perspective on transdisciplinary design, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.402