Being very human: Designerly ways of working in public sector city development as social changemaking

Abstract

Human civilization is currently facing some of its gravest challenges to date. Because of global urbanization these challenges will manifest themselves and potentially be resolved mainly in cities around the world. Following the conceptual and practical expansion of the design field in response to so called wicked problems, design approaches are considered a possible route for tackling the challenges related to sustainability. These circumstances mean that design approaches to city development in the public sector become increasingly important. Such approaches are also gaining traction rapidly, but they’re rarely studied in terms of the day-to-day work experience of the people doing the job.

Drawing on the practice-oriented tradition of understanding and researching design as designerly ways of working, this thesis sets out to explore what designerly practitioners’ experiences of working with city development in a public sector context are. Because this is an emerging design practice with no established professional qualifications, fourteen research subjects across six countries, who represent different interpretations of designerly ways of working, are open-mindedly selected, with emphasis on recent work experience rather than formal training. A substantial set of qualitative data, in the form of transcripts, sketches, notes and photos, is collected through qualitative interviews and analyzed using a basic coding technique inspired by grounded theory.

The analysis suggests nine sets of behaviors in the practitioners’ experiences as well as nine lenses that they use in a varying degree to make sense of their own work. In addition, two unifying themes emerge: that the designerly ways of working in question are primarily social and that their key concern is making change. This contrasts and adds to the established discourse about designerly ways of working, which is understood in this thesis to position those ways as a primarily intellectual activity, at its core concerned with interpreting problems and generating solutions.

The concluding proposal of this thesis, next to the suggested behaviors and lenses, is that the designerly ways of working in question can be seen as a fundamentally social activity driven by interaction, which is primarily concerned with making change, on the interpersonal, organizational and societal levels. This interpretation is in line with recent research on design for social innovation in public sector contexts.