The present research focuses on the way designers make sense of things while developing their design concepts. The idea was to investigate whether the use of an appropriate segmentation of the meaningful aspects comprising products could help designers to work more consciously and more effectively in their exploration of ideas for design concepts. To this aim a methodology based on the inclusion of different forms of knowledge to understand design situations (Cross, 2002) and design themes (Margolin, 2005) was developed, with semiotics as its modelling paradigm and cognitive psychology as its experimental counterpart.

The detrimental environmental effects associated with fashion production and consumption are increasingly recognised, and strategies in place. However, these are production-focused, top-down strategies, which do not reach where the impact is highest - the user phase, or where the scope for improvement is utmost - the design phase. A growing body of academic research, and a niche representation of practitioners have responded by developing lifecycle and whole systems approaches. This PhD thesis seeks to expand on and bring this knowledge to the unexplored domain of the highest impact – the fashion industry’s mass-market segment. Trend-forecasting is integral to the fashion design process, and supports the organisation’s commercial endeavours. This thesis explores the potential of trend-forecasting as a positive agent of change for environmental improvement at systemic level in the fashion industry’s mass-market segment. The first empirical study, Stage 1, is diagnostic and exploratory, mapping the interactions that currently exist between trend-forecasting, fashion design and environmental work. The findings and emergent theories formed the basis for a novel methodology compatible with trend-forecasting methods, processes in fashion design, and the inclusive and transformative processes implicit in sustainability. Stage 2 applies this methodology in an experimental study - a series of creative workshops with mixed fashion industry stakeholder groups in the UK and Sweden. Set in 2026, the workshops explore how the underlying proposition “what if fashion and sustainability were compatible or even synergistic?” could affect attitudinal change, and what its generative potential could be. The study shows that a richer knowledge ecology can foster proactive discussions in the realm of sustainability and fashion. It also reveals how a futures perspective and creative approach can unleash the application of fashion professionals’ skills at strategic and systemic levels. The research resulted in recommendations for the application of the new trend-forecasting methodology on a larger scale.

This thesis investigates the potential of design to intentionally mediate social interaction in ethical (mindful) ways. The subject of the study has evolved from observations and reflections on my own practice. In using the drinking vessel to explore the mediation of human face-to-face interaction through the artefact, the question arose whether some objects can influence interaction more actively than others. In particular, the question was whether and how an artefact can stimulate the user's behaviour by means of its function, and whether this stimulation can cause mindful reflection and interaction. The aim was to understand better the characteristics of this kind of object, of their impact and design, and whether they could be useful as a wider concept for design (Buchanan 2001). In the course of the study, I have developed the concept of the performative object (PO) to describe objects with these qualities of interaction. At the core of the study is a concern with identifying the PO as a separate category of definable design objects. This is under the recognition that the PO has not hitherto been recognised as a separate category and therefore it has not yet been put to its full potential use. The activity of proposing the PO as a new category determines the study as a naming and classification study (Fawcett 1999). This means, first, it is necessary to find out what POs are by defining their characteristics. Second, it is necessary to distinguish POs from other categories of objects in order to show their originality. And third, it is useful to try to assess the benefits of proposing this new category. Consequently, this thesis offers the concept development and testing of the category of PO. The concept development is used to define the concepts of mindfulness and function in the context of interaction as the main characteristics of the PO. The concept of mindfulness (Langer 1989; Udall 1996) is taken to refer to the attentiveness of the user towards the social consequences of the action performed with the object. The concept of interaction as used in this study unites concepts of human-object-interaction from Material Culture (Miller 1987; Pearce 1994 and 1995) and of social interaction from Sociology (Goffman 1967; Mead [Morris 1967]) in order to accommodate the understanding of human-object-human-interaction as a triangular relationship in the context of design

The heart of this thesis is creativity in designers, which is often taken for granted by the public, the commercial world and academia. The work investigates the nature of designer creativity and how designers are selected for employment.

In the tight of the material and cultural conditions of the present world and within the context of current design theories, this research aims to provide an understanding of Metadesign as emerging design cutture, and to integrate and advance its conceptual framework and principles through a tra nsdisci pli nary dialogue with the aesthetics and practice of Net Art. By rejecting the notion of Metadesign as an established design approach and practice, the creation of an etymological hypothesis based on the meanings of the prefix "-meta" (behind, together, between) becomes possible. Following this historical and cultural path, the research describes theories, frameworks and practices of Metadesign that have occurred in art, culture and media since the 1980s, in fields, such as, graphic design, industrial design, software engineering, information design, interaction design, biotechnotogical design, telecommunication art, experimental aesthetics, and architecture. The comparison and integration of all these approaches and viewpoints attows the identification of some design trends. More significantly, however, such an analysis enables the deconstruction of clusters of concepts and the production of a map of coherent etements. The anticipatory, participatory and sociotechnical issues raised 4 by the emerging and interconnected concepts that underlie Metadesign can be articulated and summarized in a three-fotd path based on the initial epistemological hypothesis. This can be characterized by three specific terms: 1) behind (designing design); 2) with (designing together); 3) betweenlamon3 (designing the "inbetween "). Interactive Art practitioners and theorists, both at an aesthetic and practical level, also share concerns about interaction, participation and co-creation. Compared to more financially oriented fields, Interactive Art, and collaborative practices of Net Art specificalty, have been We to answer to the new materiat and existentiat condition outlined by interconnectivity with a more dismantling experimentalism. The insights and advances they have produced in relation to the embodied and intersubjective dimension of human experience and creativity are stilt to be fully explored. Such insights can significantly fortify the three-fold path elaborated by this research, particutarty the third fo(d, which is concerned with the design of the 0rinbetween ". Focusing on collaborative systems for graphical interaction, as more suitable to the goal of understanding basic embodied and intersubjective processes of co-creation, the research identifies and analyses three projects of Net Art as case studies (GL&n6rateur Po*i 6tique, Open Studio, SITO Synergy Gridcosm). The results of these case studies provide an understanding of the experience of co-creation, a grasp of motivationat paths to co-creation, and a description of the features of the computationat environment which can sustain co-creation.

Within the field of Participatory Design, whilst there is rich debate on the participation of children, there lacks an explicit knowledge-base focused on the specific participation of young people in the teenage years. There is a need for a more in-depth and person-centred understanding of how young people participate in and can be transformed by Participatory Design. In this practice-based PhD I apply my Participatory Design practice in a research context and build upon my interests of empowering young people in an adult-centric society through design. In this explorative study, I ask: how can a Participatory Design process engage young people and lead to an understanding of their sense of agency? To answer this, I draw on evidence from my fieldwork where I collaborated with a group of fifteen young people over the course of two years. Implementing a five-phase approach, presented as a single case study, I was able to incrementally build trust and rapport with the group. By transporting the filmmaking technique of direct animation into a Participatory Design context, the young people explored and expressed their experiences of education through experimental and abstract imagery and narrating their films with song lyrics. Here I was able to learn about their localised social and educational practices, motivations, and ambitions – observing what I term agency-in-action. My four contributions to knowledge are based on my understanding and experience of the experiential, relational, and contextual dimensions of participation. Through examining the process of participation, I suggest Participatory Design practitioners develop flexible approaches that support young people to collaborate in both an independent and collective capacity, as well as seek out opportunities to bond with participants to build a relationship based on trust. I also propose a need for practitioners to critically engage with the role of context and the impact localised discourse can have on participation. In seeking to protect the participants’ anonymity whilst at the same time exploring the situational, interactional, and tacit aspects of participation, I developed a novel approach to visually documenting, reflecting, and reporting the findings. I constructed a 3D scale model box of the fieldwork setting and, using my field notes, recreated and re-lived significant and meaningful moments; presenting these as the accompanying Portfolio of Practice. These contributions provide the field with both theoretical and methodological insights that are more relevant to the teenage years. My aspiration is that the findings and approaches developed in this study will be harnessed by, give confidence to, and inspire other Participatory Design practitioners by candidly depicting the journey the young people and I went on, the relationship that developed, the challenges I had to negotiate, and the transformative impact of participation.

This thesis investigates how approaches to managing design differ nationally in new product development and design for digital technology-embedded product and service. The main aim of this thesis is, first, to understand different approaches to managing design in terms of Eastern and Western organizational cultures: second, how these differences affect actual design practices and design outcomes in increasingly complicated digital technology-embedded product development and design. Currently, design principles for digital products and services are shifting towards incrementally uncertain complexities and the role of design is becoming broader in the era of digitalization. New approaches to design management in organizations are considered in this context: more specifically, design for digital technology-embedded products and services entails generative design practices as these digital artefacts as a whole are accomplished by devising both a physical materiality and immaterial objects such as services and software with multiple design participants. Through the design process, meanings of the digital artefacts are constantly generated and recreated. For that reason, the design practices are considered about holistic approaches to embrace such generativity. In relation to this, the organizational environment needed to deal with this requires many different approaches in order to embrace the new design practices. This is concerned with enabling rather than controlling, as has been done in traditional organization environments. However, looking at actual organizational vocabularies used in design practices, there is significant inertia with organizational cultures that can harness or enable these approaches. Taking into account cross-cultural perspectives, the features of organizational vocabularies probably differ in different organizational cultures in East Asia (South Korea, Japan, and Chinese cultural background countries) and those of the West (US, UK, Finland and Netherlands) . East Asian organizations’ features are characterized as control and governance in tightly coupled and hierarchical organizational cultures, whereas Western organizations are more likely to feature enabling or even indulgence in loosely coupled cultures. These can affect actual approaches to design management in the implementation of digital innovation. A qualitative dominant-mixed method research approach is used in this research for multiple case studies: 29 design professionals, ranging from engineering and marketing to design, from across the globe participated in expert interviews in two phases of this research. Quantitative secondary data sources were investigated in support of the qualitative data sources (+150 secondary data sources: corporate documents – earnings and annual reports; and public reports on national creativity, innovation and industry ecosystems). The research findings illustrate different approaches to managing design in the East and West due to their organizational cultures: namely, the East is characterised as inflexible approaches towards completed design output, whereas the West prioritizes a flexible journey expecting design outcomes. This however causes dilemmatic conflicts in carrying out the generative design practices for creating new digital products and services within those organizations. This thesis suggests a matrix of organizational cultures for managing design and the two design management paradigms in the implementation of digital innovation in organizations: the ‘design of management’ vs. the ‘management through design’. This study provides an understanding of emergent issues about organizational environments with regards to approaches to managing design in digitalization from international and cross-cultural perspectives and will clarify the concept of the new approaches to design in digital innovation: designing. It will make a contribution to development of design management as a rigorous discipline, which can be applied to design practices for innovative organizations in the era of digitalization.

How can one justify the investment in design? By considering the relatively frequent modifications of design aspects in the service industry, the significance of justifying design investment should be addressed. In order to be a successful service business, it is critical to manage the design resources and report the outcome appropriately. Given that the main contribution of design can be the role of adding value, this study attempted to interpret the impact of design through the concept of value. Among various value theories, this study determined to utilise Holbrook’s typology of consumer value for embedding design perspectives. Holbrook’s value typology is an emotional-based holistic understanding of value which can apprehend the root causes of the preference from the customer perspective. In this context, the application of Holbrook’s value typology can contribute to the in-depth understanding of design and be extended to the other stakeholders within a business in order to understand a service business holistically for the future study. However, the greater value for a consumer is arguably not sufficient to argue the importance of design for a business. If design contributes to the greater value, value created by design activities should lead to the greater outcomes of key business phases (such as greater customer satisfaction and loyalty). This study employed statistical approaches to confirm the positive impacts of design upon key business phases quantitatively. As a result, the key findings and contributions of this study are: (1) proposing Design Value Typology which enables a better understanding of design value from customers’ emotional causes, and (2) confirming the positive influence of design to the key business phases (in other words, the investigation about a company’s efforts for improving design elements and principles can enhance the performance of the company).

As human-centred philosophies continue to permeate the landscape of design practice, education, and research, a growing body of literature concerning creative methods corresponds with a democratic process that addresses the experiences, needs, problems, and aspirations of users and stakeholders. It can be argued, however, that making tools to gather and evaluate the insights of others contributes to fluctuating perceptions of the designer as a creative auteur, visual communicator, observer, facilitator, analyst, and problem-solver. In turn, human-centred design's overarching neglect of practitioner and researcher reflexivity has resulted in insufficient reasoning and reflection surrounding subjective methodological choices and the impact these have on the direction of the process and the designer's agency. In this practice-led research, I investigate how human-centred designers collect information and build relationships with participants by making, using, and interpreting visual and participatory tools and techniques. Examining approaches including personas, scenarios, and design probes, I assert that rather than being objective and neutral in seeking participants' input, human-centred designers are inherently reflexive, yet the practical benefits of this researcher trait remain broadly unrecognised and abstract within the discipline. Situating human-centred design in the context of environmental, community, and organisational placemaking, I undertake three case studies to examine localised sociocultural issues. In these, I draw from my position as an illustrator, designer, researcher, PhD student, and participant in the process to provide intimate, immersed, and critical narrative accounts of human-centred design in its initial exploratory stages. Simultaneously, I develop, test, and critique my participatory-reflexive methodology. Conceptualised as an arrangement of people and artefacts interacting through various creative phases and activities, this structures the process as stages of orientation, participation, evaluation-in-action, tool response analysis, and reflexive analysis. I assess how the content, format, and tone of my methodological tools and techniques helped me to gather participants' drawn, written, and verbal insights, generate ideas, and make decisions whilst instigating understanding, empathy, rapport, consensus, and dialogue. These findings reinforce the designer's multifaceted reflexive role as an ethnographic explorer and storyteller, visual maker, strategic and empathic facilitator, and intuitive interpreter. Flexible and inclusive enough to navigate designers' and participants' intersubjective insights, I present the five-stage participatory-reflexive methodology as my original contribution to knowledge. I propose that this transferable framework will support designers as they engage with settings to elicit information from user and stakeholder participants, develop their own experiential and critical perspectives, and utilise their intuitive and expressive expertise to establish, manage, and sustain productive human-centred design relationships.

From innovation-driven cultures (Neumeier, 2009; Kelly, 2010) to democratic, participatory approaches (Sanders and Stappers, 2008; Binder, De Michelis, Ehn, Jaccuci, Linde and Wagner, 2011), engagement with increasingly complex disciplinary situations means that design is becoming “a more integrated activity involving collaboration among many different professions” (Cross, 2011:91). For designers, this emerging notion of design has resulted in an expansive array of approaches, co-design tools, activities, data gathering techniques and visualisations. In addition, one could argue that there is now a requirement for designers to acquire communication and facilitation skills to demonstrate and share how such methods can shape new ways of working. The meaning of these design things (Binder et al., 2011) in practice can’t be taken for granted as ‘matters of fact’ (Latour, 2005), which raises a key challenge for design. As Bruno Latour puts it: ‘where are the visualization tools that allow the contradictory and controversial nature of matters of concern to be represented?’ (Latour, 2008:9) This thesis investigation addresses Latour’s call to design for organisational and social change. Focusing on the role of design things in organisational discourse, an emerging rhetoric for design is critiqued that has driven the rise of design-led innovation in disciplines such as User-Centred Design, Design Management and Participatory Design. An exploration of the existing models and management literature for implementing change, alongside shifting representations of design knowledge, is explored to discern the ways in which organisational discourse, manifested in the power-broking devices that shape ways of working, could become an object of design. Reflective practice is explored as a mode of inquiry to position an approach to design-led innovation that is both object-oriented and reflexive, shifting the thesis towards a performative case for inquiry. The author’s approach has been to develop a visual method of mapping translated from actor-network theory (ANT). Foregrounding ANT’s focus on observation and description, the approach was applied as a frame (Callon, 1986) for representing the performative agency of design things across three case studies of design-led innovation. In case study one, designers and entrepreneurs were brought together and funded by Design in Action to develop business ideas tackling type 2 diabetes. This design-led project allowed the first iteration of actor-network mapping to represent the role of design things in its development. In case study two, a design intervention with an SME textiles manufacturer in Scotland aimed to develop a sustainable culture of innovation. This allowed exploration of the role of design things using actor-network mapping and situational analysis (Clarke, 2005), applied as interpretative overlays, on their impact with the designers. In case study three, experience-focused design labs aimed to innovate digital, product and service solutions in the context of health. This allowed for live iterations of actor-network mapping with design participants, and their emergent articulations of matters of concern. Across all three case studies, a grounded theory analysis (Charmaz, 2006) was performed on the participant interviews and mapping discussions to reveal core categories tracing the performative agency of design things as matters of concern. Actor-network mapping seeks to bring the matters of concern affecting the organisation of such work into focus as an object of design by facilitating reflexive, participatory dialogue between designers and the actors they collaborate with. The suggestion is that any notions of strategic value, of engendering meaningful change, of making things better by design, through design work, should be grounded in the reflexive interpretations of matters of concern that emerge. The contribution to knowledge, therefore, is a theory/methods package framing design as a performative act that reflexively explicates design in practice, as well as the wider discursive boundaries of design-led innovation.