Integrating Design in Governance and Management

This book explores how design can be meaningfully integrated into governance and management practices to address complex societal challenges.

Bringing together conceptual insights, empirical research, and practice-based approaches, the volume offers a critical and forward-looking perspective on the role of design in shaping future-oriented decision-making. It argues that design should not be understood merely as a tool for innovation, but as a practice of sense-making, experimentation, and world-making that helps translate abstract ambitions into actionable futures. Governance, management, and design are distinct yet increasingly interconnected practices. While governance organizes collective decision-making and management focuses on strategy and resource allocation, design has expanded beyond products and services to engage with systems, organizations, and futures. In contexts marked by uncertainty, polycrisis, and transformation, design approaches, from systemic and participatory design to speculative and practice-based methods, are increasingly mobilized to navigate complexity, mediate between actors, and prototype alternative pathways. This book critically examines these developments, highlighting both the transformative potential of design-based approaches and the risks of their instrumentalization. Through interdisciplinary contributions and case studies from Europe and North America, it demonstrates how design can support more reflexive, inclusive, and sustainable forms of governance and management.

This volume is relevant for students, researchers, and practitioners in design, governance, management, and sustainability fields, as well as for policy-makers, consultants, and professionals seeking to engage with innovative and critical approaches to contemporary transformation processes.

Andreas Metzner-Szigeth is Full Professor of Sociology at the Free University of Bolzano, Italy. He previously held professorships in Sustainability Science (Bochum, Germany), Philosophy (Vienna, Austria; Katowice, Poland), and Science, Technology and Society Studies (Donostia–San Sebastián, Spain), and served as Adjunct Professor of Sociology in Münster, Germany. He began his academic career as Assistant Professor of Environmental Sociology and Philosophy of Technology at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus. His research addresses industrial innovation and technology assessment, sustainability transitions and digital transformation, risk research and futures studies. A core focus of his work lies in examining the interplay between scientific expertise, economic actors, political decision making, and public engagement.

Ingrid Kofler is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Faculty of Design and Art at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (unibz). Her research focuses on the intersection of design, sociology, borders and digital transformation, exploring topics such as the role of design in societal change, borders and imaginaries and the impact of digital technologies on creative industries.

Harald Pechlaner is Director of the Center for Advanced Studies at Eurac Research in Bolzano and a Professor of Tourism at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, where he also serves as Director of the Entrepreneurship Center. His research focuses on the sustainable development of destinations and on selected issues of global governance related to economy and politics.

Greta Erschbamer has worked at the Center for Advanced Studies of Eurac Research, where she has been a researcher since 2016 and contributed to projects exploring tourism governance, participation, and design studies in mountain regions. She holds a Master’s Degree in Strategic Tourism Management from SKEMA Business School in France and a Master of Science in Tourism and Regional Planning from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.