Conference Agenda

In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s economy has shifted from oil dependence toward diversification, spotlighting the “creative economy”. This transformation highlights the design economy, where designers are pursuing entrepreneurial and commercial opportunities. Understanding the challenges and enablers that shape design start-ups is key to supporting their growth within the design economy. This paper, part of larger PhD research, explores the Saudi Arabia design ecosystem and the experiences of running a design start-up. The paper addresses the question: “How does the Saudi Arabian ecosystem support or hinder design start-ups?” It provides a qualitative perspective based on semi-structured interviews with fifteen designer-entrepreneurs across five Saudi Arabian cities (i.e., Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Jazan, and Tabuk). This paper contributes insight into how design start-ups operate within an emerging, non-Western creative economy, a context underrepresented in existing literature. The findings show that formal support structures remain misaligned with design practice, shaping how designer-entrepreneurs run their start-ups.

The growing recognition of design’s value to business and society has driven rapid expansion in the design industries, intensifying competition among designers and design firms. Despite an increased scholarly attention to the strategic role of design, there is a lack of understanding how design businesses strategize and position themselves in the market. We aim to revitalise this debate by reviewing a diverse range of literatures on strategic positioning of design agencies and suggest a focus on the theory of optimal distinctiveness. This theory argues that to be successful, firms need to find an optimal balance between being different to be attractive yet at the same time being similar to gain legitimacy. We conceptualize the portfolio as a strategic interface for achieving this balance as it connects internal creative capabilities with external expectations.

As discussions about AI and its societal impacts grow, questions about how to practise design responsibly and ethically have become more prominent. This paper examines how designers do ethics in practice, focusing on the relationship between universal frameworks and situated, lived experiences. Conversations with design practitioners reveal that while universal ethical frameworks provide consistency, they often overlook the everyday negotiations designers face in the workplace. Practitioners report that current governance systems, influenced by external regulations, are overly ‘top-down’ and narrowly focused on specific technologies. This approach leaves designers to identify and fill ethical gaps themselves, often through subtle, even covert, methods. Drawing on conversations with designers and my own observations, this paper reframes ethics as a dynamic, negotiated process embedded within design work. It argues that designers’ talk—their reflection, hesitation, and sense-making—serves as the key to understanding how ethics operates in practice.

This study explores how a micro craft brand sustains its original sincerity toward craftsmanship while confronting the challenges posed by industrialized production processes and economic constraints. Based on a fifteen-year practice-led case of craft entrepreneurship, it analyzes reflective negotiations between persistence and compromise, ideal and capital, craft and industry. Employing the Double Diamond model and Aristotle’s Four Causes, the research interprets the process of craft commercialization and examines the underlying motivations that sustain the existence of micro craft brands. The findings reveal that practical limitations can be transformed into drivers of creativity. “Compromise” no longer signifies failure but, when approached with sincerity, becomes a form of resilience essential for survival. In the fast-paced environment of contemporary design and creation, embracing slowness is not resistance to progress but a reflective strategy that preserves the meaning of design innovation and the dignity of the craft practitioner.

For many years, design thinking has been recognised as an important process in creating and commercialising new digital products and services. Increasingly, design researchers are attending to design thinking applied in real-world, interdisciplinary settings for entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we surface and interpret examples of design thinking in the setup and delivery of a multi-cohort education programme connecting Edinburgh’s creative industries with local expertise in digital product innovation and entrepreneurship. Through a thematic analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with programme educators and participants, we explore the role of design thinking in bridging siloed industries and ecosystems. We interpret design thinking at two levels: featured implicitly within the programme curriculum, and implied in the structure of the programme itself. We share insight into the interactions with design thinking that enabled educators to adapt the programme to its local context, and participants to navigate opportunities for entrepreneurship in the real world.

The Culture Communications Model (CCM) provides a framework for structured sensemaking grounded in everyday visual culture. It assists designers and non-designers in navigating complex contexts through four interrelated domains – physical, social, commercial and media – each examined via interpretive filters such as norms, gender, class, power and capital. Through iterative processes of finding, understanding and synthesizing, the CCM structures visual inquiry as an embodied and dialogical practice. By translating observations through these filters and reconfiguring them with conceptual tools, users can reveal hidden relationships, challenge assumptions and generate new perspectives on context and identity. The model transforms diffuse contextual information into interpretable patterns and fosters awareness of the sociocultural conditions shaping perception and design. In positioning design as a form of visual anthropology, the CCM frames the ordinary as a site of insight – rendering the familiar visible, meaningful and creatively generative, while supporting an accessible and distributed approach to visual-cultural understanding.