Designing institutions for designing policy

Policy design has returned to the centre of discussions of public policy, both for academics and practitioners. With that interest in policy design has come an interest in organisations and institutions that will do the designing, with much of the interest being in structures such as policy laboratories that attempt to foster innovation. These organisations tend to exist outside government hierarchies and support collaborative designing with stakeholders and citizens. This paper examines the potential of these structures from an organisational perspective. Although they do offer great promise as sources of innovation they also confront a number of institutional barriers and dilemmas. This paper focuses on those barriers and dilemmas, as well as some possible means of overcoming them.

Material knowledge in collaborative designing and making - A case of wearable sea creatures

This article is based on a study of novice designers’ knowledge of materials in a challenging collaborative assignment. We approached material knowledge from two complementary viewpoints: the dimensions of knowledge shared during designing, and how student teams built new knowledge during making. We found that both modalities studied—namely, words and gestures—contributed to advancement in designing. The modalities became specialised: While words served mainly to identify materials and to describe visual qualities, gestures conveyed information about size, shape, location and dynamic dimensions, such as movement and change over time, as well as signature qualities based on embodied experience. During making, ambitious teams took material decisions and the challenge of authenticity seriously, but the tight timeframe and budget compelled them to favour pragmatic choices.

Precedent-Oriented Approach to Conceptually Experimental Activity in Designing the Software Intensive Systems

The chapter presents a precedent-oriented approach to conceptually experimental activity in collaborative designing the complex systems with software. The efficiency of such work can be essentially increased if a human part of the work will be fulfilled with an orientation on using the precedents' models reflected the units of an occupational experience. In described case, interactions of any designer with a computer are organized and implemented as interactions between the designer and an “intellectual processor” as a role played by the same designer. Such version of the human-computer activity involves real-time combining “units” of the natural experience with its models. In solving the project task, this combining is brought under conceptual experimenting understood as an automated thought experimenting. The offered approach is evolved till an instrumental system that supports conceptual experimenting as a very useful form of computerized activity based on experiential human-computer interactions.