Governance and management are specialized forms of professional practice – as is design! And each has been developed to address distinct topics, find solutions for particular problems, and achieve different tasks. Be it either preparing and performing procedures of collective decision-making and implementing their results or figuring out viable or even optimal ways of allocating resources and realizing corresponding strategies for enterprises to thrive, or lastly enriching our material and visual culture with products and creations that work and simultaneously satisfy our aesthetic senses. Governance, management and design are theoretically reflected, institutionalized forms of human practice. Ideal-typically, they follow distinct rationalities, apply other methods and techniques, and make use of distinguished kinds of knowledge and abilities while providing different services. Nevertheless, as forms of professional practice they interfere with each other.

Nowadays, relating to, making use of, and adopting design thinking and working techniques have become quite interesting for other branches, following their massive promotion in the literature of the consultancy sphere over the last few decades. On the one side, this trend is being driven by the growing importance of creative industries and the demands of ongoing innovations that were and are transforming our material and digital culture. These factors are ‘pushing’ the further utilization of design practices in other sectors. On the other side, there is some ‘pull’ on their extended utilization. This is generated by certain characteristics of the ‘great challenges’ that we are being confronted with in the 21st century: the environmental and climate crisis, contradictions in globalized political economies, distortions of digitally transforming societies and others.

Striving for the critical appraisal of design-based approaches – from product and graphic design as well as communication, interaction and social design – in governance and management environments, and according to our ‘fit for the future’-motto, the conference will concentrate on an exploration of its capacities for promoting future-oriented, sustainable developments and of the opportunities to utilize them in this constructive, enabling and transformative sense.

The vital intention of the workshop is to explore design-based approaches for generating future-oriented competences in governance and management. Consequently, all contributors will address one focal question: How to inspire and facilitate future-oriented governance and management practices by means of design approaches?