Design research is rapidly becoming a knowledge-intensive field, characterized by an overwhelming scholarly interest in design’s many interfaces, from the role of design in solving societal problems, to enhancing the sustainability and profitability of businesses across industries and geographies. Artifact encourages contributions from diverse perspectives related to both traditional and the emerging new activities of design, professions of design, and organizational uses of design. The journal aims to reflect recent decades’ substantial transformation of the field of design research, with contributions that touch on design practices from a broad spectrum of scientific fields such as semiotics, design semantics, critical discourse analysis, science and technology studies, design(erly) thinking, management, organization, and material history.
We invite manuscripts that may engage with (but are not limited to) any of the following themes: 1) Theoretical and conceptual perspectives on the nature of current and future design practices; 2) Theoretical and empirical inquiries into the nature and understandings of design practices; 3) The role of design practice in shaping and realizing entrepreneurial processes and/or strategies; 4) The role of design practice in relation to societal or organizational change, innovation and value creation from a competitive, financial, social or sustainability perspective.
Broad questions that may be considered are: a) Is it possible to limit domain-specific bodies of professional knowledge and authorized procedures of design? b) What are the roles of classical design disciplines such as craft-based design, graphic design, industrial design, etc. in relation to the growing interest in the concept of ‘design thinking’? c) In a time where the boundaries between professional design fields tend to blur, does it any longer make sense to talk about a professional design practice, rather than many ways of practicing design?