Abstract
Design education is increasingly engaging with global challenges that extend beyond its traditional scope. This study adopts a constellation perspective to explore leadership as a pluralistic, relational, and interpretive practice suited to navigating complexity. A selective literature review spanning 25 years across design education, leadership, management, and research reveals six key provocations: systemic disruption, institutional constraints, commercial pressures, universalising narratives, dominant Western paradigms, and limited critical engagement. These highlight tensions that shape contemporary leadership discourse. The findings invite reflection on leadership as a capacity-building process, one that encourages abductive reasoning, material inquiry, evidentiary thinking, financial awareness, and ethical reflection through situated practice. The paper offers an alternative way of looking at how we might lead better; it is both propositional and a provocation. Leadership is framed as a practice rooted in care, judgment, and epistemic integrity, read across rather than reduced to any single model.
Keywords
design education; design leadership; constellation perspective; care
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.777
Citation
Valentine, L., and Bletcher, J. (2026) Design education leadership as constellation practice: Moving beyond the heroic leader, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.777
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Design education leadership as constellation practice: Moving beyond the heroic leader
Design education is increasingly engaging with global challenges that extend beyond its traditional scope. This study adopts a constellation perspective to explore leadership as a pluralistic, relational, and interpretive practice suited to navigating complexity. A selective literature review spanning 25 years across design education, leadership, management, and research reveals six key provocations: systemic disruption, institutional constraints, commercial pressures, universalising narratives, dominant Western paradigms, and limited critical engagement. These highlight tensions that shape contemporary leadership discourse. The findings invite reflection on leadership as a capacity-building process, one that encourages abductive reasoning, material inquiry, evidentiary thinking, financial awareness, and ethical reflection through situated practice. The paper offers an alternative way of looking at how we might lead better; it is both propositional and a provocation. Leadership is framed as a practice rooted in care, judgment, and epistemic integrity, read across rather than reduced to any single model.