This paper presents a case study of Green Social Prescribing (GSP) in Walsall, a medium-sized urban area located in the West Midlands, UK. GSP is a means of enabling health professionals to refer people to a range of local non-clinical nature-based activities, e.g., community gardening and conservation volunteering. As a new practice to address multiple challenges in health and sustainability, GSP has been promoted by the UK government and the NHS in the past few years. There is as yet limited evidence and knowledge about how this approach is implemented at a local level. This paper addresses this gap of knowledge, by exploring how GSP is implemented in Walsall as a case study. Based on extensive engagement and research activities with the local partners to collect data, this paper reveals the local contexts of GSP, the referral pathways, and people’s lived experience, discussing the challenges, barriers, and opportunities in delivering GSP at the local level. This study suggests that a more collaborative and genuine place-based approach is essential, and alongside GSP, investment into infrastructure is needed to move the health paradigm further from ‘prevention’ to ‘promotion’ so that more people can benefit from what nature can offer.

Nature-based solutions (NbS), including green social prescribing (GSP), are sustainable ways to address health and wellbeing, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the strain on healthcare. NbS require national and local cross-sector coordination across complex, interrelated systems, but little is known about the specific challenges this poses for community-led NbS. We carried out a traditional literature review to establish the context and knowledge base for this study and interviewed 26 stakeholders. These came from environment, health and social care sectors at national and local levels, with local-level stakeholders from Bradford and Walsall: English cities significantly affected by the pandemic, with high levels of deprivation and health inequality. The interviews explored experiences of implementing NbS, both pre- and post-pandemic and the resulting renewed interest in the salutogenic effects of engaging with natural environments. We coded the interview transcriptions using NVivo to identify the challenges existing in the systems within which these stakeholders operate to create and manage NbS. By synthesizing what is known about the challenges from existing literature with findings from the interviews, we developed eight categories of challenges (perception and knowledge, political, financial, access to natural spaces, engagement, institutional and organisational, coordination, GSP referral and services) faced by multiple sectors in implementing community-led NbS in England. Furthermore, this study highlights the new challenges related to the pandemic. Identifying these challenges helps stakeholders in existing complex systems recognise what is needed to support and mainstream NbS in England.

Design management is a relatively new concept compared with either design practice or management science. There have been various approaches which have tried to conceptualize design management issues, but most of these have considered design management in an organizational perspective, in isolation from the context in which the design profession is practised – the design industry – and thus are unlikely to capture the emerging issues driven by design industry trends. This suggests a need for a design management model that conceptualizes design management practice in addressing the issues of concern to various stakeholders within the sector.This paper develops a conceptual framework by positioning design management within the design industry's knowledge supply chain. It defines design management as the management of the interface between design practice and other industry forces. The proposed conceptual framework is evaluated by comparing it with existing theoretical concepts and models. It conclud...

This paper presents the findings from a systemic enquiry into the current research on Service Design (SD). It examines academic publications on SD over the last two decades using a summative content analysis of 305 articles that use SD as one of its ‘author provided subjects’. The analysis revealed: (1) three distinct groups of publications that use SD differently, with research rooted in Design (142 articles) seen as the driver for development of SD as a discipline; (2) a typological overview of SD research including nine categories differentiated by ‘knowledge’ and ‘methods’. The findings suggest that SD research is largely comprised of practice-oriented and phenomenological studies based on interpretative approaches. Research underpinned by objectivism is noticeably rarer. Future research needs to go beyond practice-based research, to embrace more objective and systemic approaches.