Economy as a transforming practice: design theory and practice for redesigning our economies to support alternative futures

Addressing economic challenges through designers’ glasses is a practice that is gathering traction. We postulate to radically rethink our economies and start looking at them as a transforming practice to reshape our future. With this essay we propose to approach economics and economies as a design theory and practice, not to replace economics, but to offer an action-oriented design approach to economies and economics. Design thinking found its way into the business world well over 15 years ago. By treating economies as a transforming practice, we are making the next step, offering design as an action-oriented co-development approach to address societal challenges in a systemic way, based on complexity, responsibility and situatedness. In this chapter, we share how we, as design researchers, see how economies could be approached as transforming practices.