— 754 761 Celebration & Contemplation, 10th International Conference on Design & Emotion 27 — 30 September 2016, Amsterdam Introduction There are more and more complex challenges in our society today. Requiring companies to constantly adapt and change. According to Brown, Harris & Russel (2010) we are not always able to deal with these challenges because of 1) their complexity; there’s no single person, department or company that can solve them, 2) the compartmentalization of knowledge; experts have knowledge related to part of the problem, but the overview is missing and 3) the lack of communication between companies, departments, professionals and policy makers. Simply put, because the challenges are too complex to solve within department or company boundaries we need to go beyond them and work together. It is key for all stakeholders to come together and use their collective intelligence to work on a challenge otherwise the change won’t succeed. Of course whether it is a departmental, divisional or organizational change, it is always individuals who are on the receiving end. They will ultimately cause the change to be a success or a failure (Cameron, Green 2015). Or as Kotter puts it ‘without motivation people won’t help and the effort goes nowhere’ Kotter (2012). Designers have shown to be capable of bringing stakeholders together in co-design and co-creation (Cross 2007). We believe designers can also bring together stakeholders in organizational change projects and can even go beyond that in directing the change process itself. Tim Brown recently named ‘involving stakeholders’ as the biggest challenge for designers today (Brown 2015). He even argued that the interventions that the designers designed to get a new service or product design integrated into the status quo is more critical to success than the design itself. Also, FastCompany named ‘interventionist’ as one of the future design roles. Which they described as: experts in facilitating creative conversations (Fastcodesign,2016). All of which, we think, is part of a designer role to assist in organizational change. This design case is a first effort to explore how we can include all in an organizational change and what the role of a designer can be in this process. When we talk about the role of the designers in organizational change, we do mean a specific part of the change effort. We think designers can be of great help right after the change effort has started up onto the point where there is enough momentum in the organization to drive the change effort themselves. (see Figure 2) We use ‘workshop design’ and workshop(s) to work towards the momentum (see Figure 1) To illustrate the role of designers in organizational change, we use an example of one workshop. Below some background information, to put the example into context. Abstract There are more and more complex challenges in our society today. Requiring companies to constantly adapt and change. Because the challenges are too complex to solve within department or company boundaries we need to go beyond them. It is key for all stakeholders to come together on a challenge otherwise the change won’t succeed. Or as Kotter puts it ‘without motivation people won’t help and the effort goes nowhere’ Kotter (2012). Designers have shown to be capable of bringing stakeholders together in co-design and co-creation. We believe they can also bring together stakeholders in organizational change projects and can even go beyond that in directing the change process itself. This design case is a first effort to explore how we can include all in an organizational change and what the role of a designer can be in this process. Keywords Organizational change, Visualizing, Designerly ways, Inclusion Design for inclusion – How designers can help with organizational change - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Freya Ruijs1 freya@jamvisualthinking.com 1JAM visual th