art 6 (1+2) pp. 4.1–4.

4 Intellect Limited 2019

Artifact: Journal of Design Practice

Volume 6 Numbers 1 & 2
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Intellect Limited. English language. doi: 10.1386/art_00004_2

EDITORIAL

NICKY NEDERGAARD
Editor-in-Chief

Design practice (research):

Future value creation for
design education, society and
business?

The research presented in this double issue of Artifact: Journal of Design

Practice illustrates the plethora of agendas, perspectives and epistemologies
characterizing current streams of design research – arguably, a pluralism much
needed. As widely reported in the popular and academic design literature,
we find ourselves – whether as design researchers and/or practitioners – in a
time of flux and dualities, which more than ever makes it painstakingly diffi-
cult to respond to pertinent questions such as what is to be associated with
trained designers’ unique practices, value creation and claim to a profession in
its own right (Jensen 2019; Julier 2014)? Thus, more than ever, there is a need
for advancing our understanding of past and contemporary developments in
design practices (research) across disciplines, domains and contexts in order to
keep informing – as nuanced and multifaceted as possible – designerly ways
of contemplating and accommodating possible futures of design practice’s
value creation potential in and across design education, society and business.

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Nicky Nedergaard

As reflected by the content of this issue this broad and pressing agenda
may very well start by foregrounding new insights into how design educa-
tors may connect more strongly their developments of pedagogical practices
to knowledge on the needs and desires for design-based competencies and
sensibilities in the design (services) labour markets. With this issue’s first three
articles – presented briefly in the below – such very issues related to develop-
ments in practices of design-based education, learning and pedagogy are dealt
with from diverse perspectives and research disciplines. In addition, this issue
presents ‘commentaries’ as a new type of format within the journal. Linked
to the article by Bang and Agger Eriksen – concerned with the knowledge-
generating value of design research experiments – we introduce the commen-
tary-format with reflections on past and current developments of the design
experiment in research through (participatory) design. This commentary is
authored by professor Thomas Binder. Lastly, we touch upon the potential of
co-design practices in eliciting and developing new conceptions of value in
the context of creative industry micro-businesses.
The first article, ‘Comparing employability priorities of emerging and expe-
rienced interior designers’ by Amy Huber and Lisa Waxman from Florida State
University, discusses the employability of emerging interior designers in a US
context. The article examines alignments and discrepancies between emerg-
ing (early career) interior designers’ view on competencies of importance
to their employability in relation to the priorities of hiring design managers
in the interior design labour market. Based on analyses of survey data from
emerging designers, compared to extant findings on the hiring priorities of
design managers, the results presented support the imperative of cultivating
so-called ‘soft skills’ with designers as a central feature of their labour market
value proposition. Analytical findings are concludingly discussed with impli-
cations for emerging designers as well as design educators.
The second article, ‘Investigating design-based learning ecologies’,
is written by Bruce Snaddon (Cape Peninsula University of Technology)
and colleagues (Andrew Morrison and Peter Hemmersam, Oslo School of
Architecture and Design; Andrea Grant Broom, Cape Peninsula University
of Technology; and Ola Erstad, University of Oslo). In this article the agenda
of design education and learning is pursued with a focus on developing our
understanding of how educators of design, urbanism and sustainability may
engage in proactive efforts to bring emergent design practices and changing
societal needs for design’s value creation together. The authors base their key
argument on four interesting case studies, spanning the African and European
continents. The imperative of advancing futuring pedagogical practice, the
authors argue, may be achieved as educators and students engage in co-creat-
ing learning ecologies. Such learning ecologies afford an agile pedagogy and
a multimodal as well as highly context-sensitive learning experience in deal-
ing with schisms between what is and what might be in contemporary urban
design(er) engagements.
The third article, ‘Can participatory design support the transition into
innovative learning environments?’ by Bodil Bøjer from The Royal Danish
Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design, rounds off this issue’s collection of
papers invested in research related to design education and pedagogical prac-
tice. In this article Bøjer discusses issues of integrating changing pedagogical

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 Design practice (research)

practices, spatial affordances and learning environments. On the basis of a

project with a cohort of elementary school teachers and pupils, Bøjer demon-
strates how the use of co-design methods and physical design objects repre-
sents a promising approach to facilitating spatial literacy and competencies
that support stronger integration of pedagogical practices, spatial affordances
and (dynamic) learning environments.
The fourth article, ‘Experiments all the way in programmatic design
research’ by Anne Louise Bang from Kolding School of Design and Mette
Agger Eriksen from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, examines from
within the literature on research through design issues of operationalizing the
roles and characteristics of design experiments in different stages of program-
matic design research. Drawing on the work of Donald Schön, the authors
present three overall contributions for mitigating identified issues. This article,
reprinted with kind permission of the authors, serves the important purpose
of bringing attention to the many gems of this journal’s back catalogue. As
noted by Thomas Binder in revisiting this article, there is an important – yet
often neglected – potential in looking back in order to see clearer ahead.
In a short commentary, Binder further reflects on the temporal context and
research ambitions of Bang and Agger Eriksen’s work while glancing into the
future(s) of programmatic or constructive design research and the making of
theory.
The fifth and last article, ‘Design Innovation for creative growth: Modelling
relational exchange to support and evaluate creative enterprise in the Scottish
Highlands and Islands’, by Michael Pierre Johnson and Lynn-Sayers McHattie
from The Glasgow School of Art and Katherine Champion from The University
of Stirling, focuses on the potential of co-design practices in the context of
creative industries micro-businesses. The authors employ actor–network
mapping and apply a ‘Creative Growth Model’ to expand our mainstream
economic value conceptions to also include situated relational exchange
values that are grounded in networked and collaborative paradigms. This
research points towards promising new avenues for (co-)designers to deploy
generative models and practices in ways that aid micro- (creative) businesses
to reflect on, become aware of, and showcase their social and cultural value
beyond contemporary dominant (political) logics of economic growth.
Lastly, I would like to thank my dear colleagues, Stig Lyngaard Hansen,
Camilla Ryan Sørensen and Margrethe Bredahl, librarians at The Royal
Academy of Fine Arts (KADK), for undertaking a review of the recently
launched online resource ‘Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts’. I hope dear reader
that you will find the content interesting and possibly generative to your own
practice as design researcher and/or practitioner. Lastly, I would like to thank
all of this issue’s contributing authors and our reviewers for taking time to
qualify our work on this issue.
Enjoy the read!

REFERENCES
Jensen, H.-C. (2019), ‘Positioning design professions’, in G. Julier, A. V. Munch,
M. N. Folkmann, H.-C. Jensen and N. P. Skou (eds), Design Culture: Objects
and Approaches, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 111–13.
Julier, G. (2014), The Culture of Design, London: Sage.

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This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial

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Nicky Nedergaard has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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