Integrating Design in Governance and Management

This book explores how design can be meaningfully integrated into governance and management practices to address complex societal challenges.

Bringing together conceptual insights, empirical research, and practice-based approaches, the volume offers a critical and forward-looking perspective on the role of design in shaping future-oriented decision-making. It argues that design should not be understood merely as a tool for innovation, but as a practice of sense-making, experimentation, and world-making that helps translate abstract ambitions into actionable futures. Governance, management, and design are distinct yet increasingly interconnected practices. While governance organizes collective decision-making and management focuses on strategy and resource allocation, design has expanded beyond products and services to engage with systems, organizations, and futures. In contexts marked by uncertainty, polycrisis, and transformation, design approaches, from systemic and participatory design to speculative and practice-based methods, are increasingly mobilized to navigate complexity, mediate between actors, and prototype alternative pathways. This book critically examines these developments, highlighting both the transformative potential of design-based approaches and the risks of their instrumentalization. Through interdisciplinary contributions and case studies from Europe and North America, it demonstrates how design can support more reflexive, inclusive, and sustainable forms of governance and management.

This volume is relevant for students, researchers, and practitioners in design, governance, management, and sustainability fields, as well as for policy-makers, consultants, and professionals seeking to engage with innovative and critical approaches to contemporary transformation processes.