Conference Agenda

More than 70% of the energy within the design process is not spent on creativity, but on organization and management, in particular on the customer relationship. For this reason, this paper examines design management at the organizational interface of design and helps to improve the understanding of organizational practices between design companies, project partners and clients (SMEs). The main questions considered are: How can collaboration be described? What are conflicting expectations? When is the collaboration successful? Methodologically, narrative interviews and grounded theory are used to collect and analyse data for a qualitative empirical field study. The results show conflicts that can be resolved and the awareness which can increase organisational practice’s efficiency and success rate. Furthermore, there are similar view points of designers and Entrepreneurs that may strengthen cooperation. This article provides more awareness about the different targets and needs in organisational and managerial practices of design businesses and facilitates cooperation with less personal resistance and better results.

This paper considers how decentralisation affects how services are conceived and developed in digitally mediated environments. It acknowledges the changing nature of work and the recognition of ‘immaterial labour’ in facilitating the circulation of information to produce service value. The shift away from Taylorist modes of production towards networked coordination increasingly situates the customer within digital service ‘regimes’, which both utilises and configures resources within their given context, whether a home, city or wider environmental region. The performative aspect of digitally mediated experiences engages human subjectivities by means of affordances of the resources within a space. Resources are thereby assimilated by digital media, while digital media also configures resources within the space. These configurations only exist with participation at scale because they require network effects, yet they alienate subjectivities in the formulation of their ‘ideological product’. Decentralisation involves alternative means of managing resources, which draws on principles of commons and commoning. Blockchains involve publicly accessible ‘stateful’ representations of the resources they represent, and are understood as an alternative institutional technology, alongside markets, firms and states. Their collective operation is conducted through the self-referencing ‘autopoietic’ governance of decentralised protocols that reintroduce subjectivities within their ‘networked sovereignties’.