This article presents the pedagogical translation and exploratory implementation of a holistic approach to sociotechnical transition design in engineering education. A review of complex adaptive system theory, sociotechnical transition theory, innovation systems approaches, transition design, risk society theory, and systemic design approaches identifies strengths and limitations in existing methods for addressing the complex challenges facing engineers, highlighting the need for a more integrative perspective. In response, we adopt the Enabling Innovation Model, an innovation science framework structured around three iterative design phases—Envision, Shape, and Pursue—to guide students through problem exploration, solution development, and implementation planning. Developed and employed at a US R1 research university, the approach integrates technical design with broader system considerations, emphasizing social impact, sustainability, and resilience. Qualitative analysis of self-reported outcomes from two cohorts (N = 77) provides preliminary evidence of shifts in students’ perspectives on solution scope, innovation processes, and contextual complexity. By empowering students to proactively shape systemic change, the model offers a potential response to calls for engineering education to produce graduates capable of designing solutions that address public welfare while accounting for global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic contexts.
Capital design is a nascent discipline that reconceives institutional asset allocation as a design practice rather than a static optimization exercise. Traditional finance treats asset allocation as a decision under aleatory risk, solvable through equilibrium models and periodic rebalancing. Yet modern institutional investors operate in complex, co-evolving environments marked by epistemic uncertainty, interdependent feedback loops, universal ownership exposures, and long-horizon systemic risks. This article offers a unified conceptual vocabulary for Capital design and positions asset allocation as a structured exploration–commitment process through which investment products are co-created and investment firms co-evolve with their environments. Through a Triple Diamond model, Capital design integrates choice-making (expanding possibilities under uncertainty) with decision-making (committing under constraints) across both internal and external environments. Capital design reframes the agency problem from one of control to one of systemic alignment, using design tools such as transparency, iteration, and stakeholder co-creation to coordinate firm, client, and societal goals. By defining the core concepts of finance, capital, risk, systemic investing, universal ownership, and design-led allocation, this article provides the foundational language that is necessary for the development of Capital design as both a research framework and a practical methodology for institutional adaptation in a dynamically complex world.
This article is a case study, written from the inside, of one of the largest pension funds in the world, PFZW, from the Netherlands. It focuses on the process used to transform the company into one that takes responsibility for certain systemic risks, first and foremost climate change, and for directing long-term capital allocation toward desirable futures. The first part describes what triggered the process leading to the White Sheet of Paper project, the project setup, and its outcomes. We approached the project as a design problem rather than an optimization problem. It looks at the translation into practice now, a decade later. The second and last part focuses on the Capital Design angle of this project. What are the lessons learned from this project? What are my reflections on the approach? What does the case reveal about institutional change, sensemaking, or navigating uncertainty? Can we use the design principles in finance? Answering such questions sheds light on the use of intuitive design approaches by institutional investors. It aims to blur the borders between capital and design. Hopefully, this will lead to a couple of questions for future research in design in finance and insights relevant to practitioners.
Mission design, as a novel suite of design practices, demonstrates how design can act as a structuring logic for large-scale sustainability transitions. Using collaborative design as a mechanism for co-designing ambitious innovation portfolios, missions can redefine how institutions perceive risk, directionality, and value creation. This article examines the application of design practices in the context of missions. It highlights the important differences between traditional innovation systems and a normative mission framework aimed at catalyzing innovation to solve social and environmental challenges. Although the practices, methods, and cultures of design are broadly similar across contexts, the economic logics are different. This article therefore draws on examples of mission design, seeking to make explicit how missions are economically distinct from traditional innovation investment tools and contrast these with practices focused on the acceleration and scaling of commercial innovation.
For most investors, the function of investing is to offset future liabilities, such as retirement. Yet, most investors define success as “beating a benchmark,” rather than funding the future. That misalignment, and the limited design decisions associated with it, stems from Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), which treats the general price level of the market as exogenous. Recently, the assumption that you cannot impact beta has been challenged by system-level investing. By reducing risk to the environmental, social, and financial systems on which the capital markets rely, system-level investors attempt to improve the overall risk/return profile of the capital markets, which determines 75–94 percent of the variability of your return. But if traditional, MPT-driven investment follows well-trodden paths, system-level investing is bushwacking through a dynamic real-world landscape. To facilitate that, we propose a set of design principles: Consensus, Relevance, Effectiveness, and Magnitude, to ensure investors focus on material systemic risks; Adaptability, Clarity, Connectivity, and Directionality, to help create healthy real-world systems. To achieve those goals, we provide a three-part taxonomy of tools: Investment Enhancement, Field Building, and Opportunity Generation. These design rules help investors cut through the complexity of system-level investing to improve the total risk/return profile rather than trying to beat a benchmark.
Designers and managers both seek to redesign value in ways that serve both societal and business goals. However, they often struggle to work together. In interviews with designers and managers, we observed hidden assumptions and entrenched practices that inhibit collaboration. We identified six double binds, conflicting demands or expectations, in which design is simultaneously supported and obstructed in organizations. Many designers, however, have found ways of addressing these double binds within their own organizations. These cases lead us to five design principles for redesigning value for a better world: start with relationships, design materials and mindsets, collectively confront assumptions, seize the critical moment, and show design leadership.
Institutional investors rely on inherited asset class taxonomies that simplify decision-making but constrain holistic portfolio thinking. This article introduces Capital Design, a researcher-practitioner framework that treats asset classes as designable constructs and integrates eight design capabilities: abstraction, foresight, sensemaking, reframing, synthesis, abduction, mediation, and connecting. Drawing on participatory action research, research through design, and critical literature review, the study shows how embedding design interventions within pension funds and sovereign investors enables new forms of strategic choice-making under uncertainty. Through fieldwork, interviews, and studio experiments, the article demonstrates how these capabilities expand the investment choice set, leading to new asset archetypes, governance models, and portfolio configurations. By reframing asset classes as world-making devices rather than neutral categories, Capital Design offers a method for fiduciaries to align portfolios with systemic transitions such as decarbonization, digital sovereignty, and resilience while maintaining institutional rigor. The article positions design as an epistemic infrastructure for navigating uncertainty and shaping the futures capital enables.
Asset owners—defined here as pensions, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and foundations—face transformative pressures as AI, automation, and other autonomous systems reshape market structures, investment access, information advantages, operating costs, and the distribution of economic rents. Yet most of these mission-driven institutions were not built for a world of rapid change. Many were optimized for defensibility and procedural prudence rather than adaptation to change, leaving them increasingly misaligned with the opportunity set and risk environment ahead. This article explains why innovation in asset ownership is both necessary and persistently slow. We examine how innovation occurs inside asset owners and why it so often stalls. We introduce a “gearbox” model in which organizational identity drives asset allocation and, ultimately, implementation. When asset owners spin the allocation gear faster than organizational structures and implementation capabilities can adapt, the system grinds: initiatives stall, learning is outsourced, and change becomes symbolic rather than durable. We conclude with a practical operating model for turning catalyst windows into durable innovation capabilities.
Sustainability issues in makerspaces stem from the unstructured nature of rapid prototyping and the lack of frameworks that bridge ethical, ecological, and social concerns. This study investigates how sustainability-related values are articulated, negotiated, and translated into material and procedural practices within makerspaces, and how designers shape these processes. Drawing on in-depth interviews across diverse makerspace contexts, the analysis develops an empirically grounded account of prefigurative design, showing how aspirational values are embedded in collaborative making. The findings identify value anchoring, anticipatory material experimentation, and collective governance as constituting a prefigurative design space—a theoretical and material construct in which alternative sociotechnical futures can be explored and collaboratively enacted. However, realizing this potential requires navigating constraints such as weak governance, superficial sustainability engagement, resource limitations, and difficulties in sustaining ethical commitments. The study highlights the evolving role of designers as mediators who facilitate reflexive deliberation, cultivate productive irresolution, and translate prefigurative orientations into actionable and context-sensitive design practices. By specifying the conditions and mechanisms that sustain prefigurative design, the study shows how makerspaces generate both technical and non-technical outcomes, functioning not only as hubs for prototyping but also as environments in which socially just and sustainability-oriented futures are materially and procedurally crafted.
This article explores the concept of “ready-made futures” through the lens of the DIY chair to examine the consequences that arise when industrial design aligns with capitalism. Initially conceived as critiques of consumerism, iconic DIY chair designs have since been commodified. Examples include Enzo Mari’s Sedia Uno and Van Bo Le Mentzel’s 24-Euro Chair. These designs turned the act of “doing it yourself” into a marketable promise of empowerment. Today, they offer ready-made solutions in the form of toolkits that effectively exclude genuine alternatives. This transformation reflects the defuturing spirit of modernist design: DIY, once positioned as a counter practice to industrial mass production, now serves neoliberal logics of self-reliance, precarity, and consumption. Addressing this tension, the article introduces a participatory design workshop in which participants collectively made and unmade DIY chairs. Rather than producing new consumer goods, the workshop created material expressions of social critique addressing issues such as aging, precarious labor, migration, and environmental care. Drawing on the concepts of unmaking to critique the emphasis in design on production and progress, the article demonstrates how exploratory design practices can challenge dominant narratives and open alternative imaginaries.
This article explores how generative AI reshapes authorship, presence, and meaning in design. To situate this shift, it compares today’s disruption with photography’s nineteenth-century challenge to painting, when automation displaced documentation and creativity shifted toward perception and subjectivity. A similar redistribution occurs today: as generative systems automate craft, creativity is reconfigured toward prompting, iteration, and negotiation. The article advances three conceptual contributions. First, the symbiosis–agency–meaning-making triangle offers a heuristic for analyzing how authorship unfolds in human–system interaction. Second, the concept of interactional literacy names the competences required to navigate co-adaptive AI systems, extending debates on design and AI literacy toward practices of negotiation and reflection. Third, aura is reframed through three models—prompt aura, interactional aura, and algorithmic signature—translating Walter Benjamin’s contested concept into design-relevant dimensions and showing how presence emerges as resonance layered across prompts, processes, and system tendencies. Together, these frameworks highlight that authorship is redistributed through negotiation and response; that aura is reconfigured as a relational presence built across iterative layers; and that literacy emerges not as mastery but as dialogue. For design research, the task is to develop systems, practices, and pedagogies that sustain authorship as accountable, plural, and open to critique in the age of generative AI.
This article examines the impact of design on the modernization of Finland. The international breakthrough of Finnish design in the 1950s marks a period of aesthetic modernization of the country. In the 1960s, Finnish design underwent a radical turn. Critics faulted it for being elitist. They claimed that the numerous prizes Finnish design had won and its manifestly aesthetic spirit had distracted attention from designers’ true responsibilities, which lay with ordinary people. As a result, the focus shifted from beauty toward the social impacts of design. After the breakthrough of industrial design in the 1970s, attention turned to the strategic potential of design in the management of businesses and organizations. The late 1990s also saw a period of methodological renewal driven by research, which laid the foundations for user-centered design thinking. A major step forward took place in 2000, when the Finnish Government adopted a national design strategy. This long trajectory of design paved the way for Aalto University, a new innovation university, where design plays a key role. Today, design perspectives have expanded from human-centered to planet-centered thinking, supporting the socially transformative goals outlined in the Cumulus Design Declaration 2025.
The significance of aesthetic experiences in shaping human perception and interaction with spaces has long been acknowledged in art and design theory. While neuroscience research highlights the importance of aesthetic experiences, empirical studies examining spatial experience and the influence of the environment on aesthetic perception using neuroscience technologies remain scarce. This study addresses this gap by investigating users’ aesthetic experiences in immersive environments that allow free movement under varying conditions. The objective is to evaluate whether consumer-grade biosensor technologies can assist architectural researchers in exploring how design decisions influence aesthetic experience. Using a 32-channel EEG system, the experiment explored the aesthetic experiences of 25 participants across three immersive VR environments. Analyses were conducted using Power Spectral Density and Linear Mixed-Effects Modelling. Results linking neural activity to aesthetic ratings reveal suppressive effects of left and mid-parietal beta activity on aesthetic perception, alongside facilitatory effects from right central low-gamma activity. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the environment modulates aesthetic experience through a neuro–perceptual mechanism, highlighting the delicate balance between cognitive and emotional engagement and processing fluency in shaping aesthetic perception.
This article presents a novel approach—Ontological Future Making—that prioritizes transformative action. Rather than considering distant possibilities and consequences of futures, this approach engages with the negotiation of futures in the present. It is based on a review of existing work from the field of design anthropology. The article describes three steps of Ontological Future Making: to understand the future orientations of actors involved, engage with the immediate tensions that arise from their negotiation, and transform the ontological conditions that constrain future possibilities. We illustrate the approach with empirical data from a local energy transition project in Amsterdam Southeast. In this empirical account, we describe the future orientations of project partners and local residents and identify tensions related to extractive research and disciplinary differences. We describe the actions taken to address these tensions and describe our collaboration with residents to establish a local energy community. We characterize this initiative as transformative action as it served to enable shared futures for the project. We discuss the implications of these findings, arguing that future making should be more direct, political, and relational.
Visioning—the act of imagining futures—plays a crucial role in design, projecting possibilities, desires, and intentional directions into the future. Yet visioning methods face significant limitations, especially in Global South settings. These include the challenge of asking individuals in life-threatening contexts to imagine ideal scenarios, and the persuasive force of innovations from Global North contexts, which reflect ontological and temporal linearity. To address these limitations, this article focuses on the future-making experiences of women and plants in public spaces in Hermosillo, Mexico. In this city, women and plants are excluded from public spaces by design. In response, women formed collective embroidery circles. As a culturally situated practice, embroidery loosens the constraints of linearity through embodied reflexivity and cyclical temporality. In these circles, women reflected on their relationships with plants and the local ecosystem; rather than relying on long-term visioning, they made futures through tactile and affective embodied encounters with the public space. The article introduces conviviality as an approach for future-making, emphasizing people’s capacity to transform their lives through relational, affective, and material practices. The findings cover three themes: re-existence of memories and recognition of possibilities; how women-plant entanglements reveal the value of those relations; and the convivial reappropriation of the public space through embroidery and design. By foregrounding affect, embodiment, and cyclical temporality, this work contributes to emerging conversations in design and organizational theory about how futures are imagined, enacted, and made available through transformative acts in the here and now.
