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Zhang, Yanfang; Inamura, Tokushu; Ito, Shinichiro; Cruz, Christian

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In recent years, design workshops have gained attention as a means for driving innovation and solving social issues. Particularly in initiatives aimed at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), workshops that leverage design thinking have proven effective in garnering collaboration from a broad range of stakeholders. Typically, design workshops require participants to create ideas that can be propelled toward social implementation. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how leadership styles affect the workshop process and subsequent social implementation activities. Team leaders play a crucial role in unifying the team and promoting collaboration with communities and stakeholders. Understanding how this leadership influences social implementation and identifying the common characteristics of successful leaders are important, but these factors have not been sufficiently examined as contributors to successful social implementation. In response, this study seeks to address these challenges by examining the impact of team leaders on social implementation and proposing a more effective workshop management method. Using a Participatory Research approach, this study will use participatory design workshops as case studies, focusing on the relationship between workshop management and social implementation and clarifying how the role of team leaders enhances the likelihood of social implementation. Specifically, the research will: (1) review participatory design workshops conducted from 2012 to 2024 from the perspective of workshop organizers, analyze recorded data to identify shifts in factors related to social implementation through the lens of team leadership over the past 13 years; (2) interview team leaders who achieved social implementation to clarify motivations and specific post-workshop activities, make comparisons with the teams that did not achieve social implementation to extract distinguishing factors and contributors; (3) examine the relationship between team leaders, community resources, challenges, and opportunities to identify success factors for social implementation; and (4) analyze the results to propose a workshop management method that enhances the potential for social implementation. Close collaboration between team leaders and communities to generate feasible solutions has been identified as a key factor in increasing the likelihood of social implementation. Based on these findings, this study proposes a workshop management method based on collaboration with local communities. This method will enable workshop participants to explore solutions that are adapted to the needs of the community, thus taking concrete steps toward a sustainable society. The methodology proposed in this study is expected to be useful for producing effective outcomes in design workshops, offering practical value for addressing social challenges through design workshops.

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