The aim of this section organised by the Design Innovation Management Special Interest Group with themed track on the Design Policy was to explore Changing Design Policies and Practices. Design has played a vital role in the development of economies, societies and cultures globally. Governments in nations – such as Korea, Denmark and the UK – have long recognised the contribution design makes towards success and have employed a wide variety of approaches to create environments conducive to design. Different national contexts have called for differing tactics to encourage companies to use design more strategically but have met barriers. Yet research into those policies (defined here as ‘political visions into programmes and actions to develop national design resources and encourage their effective use’ (Raulik-Murphy, 2014) and their ability to unlock the potential of the design industry to respond to social challenges is both recent and scant.
This section starts by identifying and critically examining national and regional design policies, which guide the interaction of design capacities, seen as a stimulus for economic and social change. Looking to the future, there is significant interest in how design policies may be instrumental in catalysing national responses to global challenges re: poverty, ageing and health; conflict and security; climate change; and in the ‘movement of everything’ (Cooper, 2015).
The section then moves on to consider how design approaches address this. One of the triggers for, and consequences of, this change is an incorporation of co-design as a process in which designers and users collaborate as ‘equals’ to develop innovative solutions. The UK Design Council is, for example, advocating the use of co-design methods to support the development of practical innovative solutions to social problems such as increased cost of elderly care or tackling child poverty (Design Council, n.d.).
The involvement of users in developing solutions acknowledges that their take up is dependent on the ways users make and negotiate meanings of objects and services (Vossoughi, 2013). Research suggests that a move to incorporate co-design processes will have significant implications on future designers’ and researchers’ practices (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). So we proposed to explore the following question: how we design, what we design, and who designs?
This leads to questions as to how we best facilitate, resource, and grow such cooperative practices, in both the cultural and organizational senses. This leads us consider issues of support, co-location and clustering, and ultimately back to consideration of policy, and the extent to which this is/should be top-down (market failure driven) or bottom-up (ecological).
Authors contributing to this section consider points such as:
 Emergent trends in design policy
 Understanding how such policies might be embedded within the private, public and service sectors
 The value of design, its dimensions and influences, and how differing design approaches address this
 An exploration of sense-making and meaning within innovation
 Evaluations of participatory methods which facilitate co-design processes
 The challenges for stakeholders within co-design, and the support needs of local communities and start-ups
 The significance of resourcing and clustering, and the implications best practice has on policy formation.
Unpacking this discourse in more detail, the papers are presented under four sub-themes: emergent thinking in design policy; the value of design and how design approaches might address this; the emergence of co-design in addressing social challenges; and the significance of resourcing and clustering.