The Essence of Strategic Design
"Strategic design requires a high-level vision, insight into future trends, understanding the relationship of technology to social change, user-centred design expertise, and a "whole systems" design methodology."
- Garry Swift (Swift, n.d.)
"The process of developing strategy as informed by the design-thinking process - is at the nexus of design thinking and strategy, and in many ways resolves this dilemma because it is a shared platform, integrating design and business principles."
- Natalie W.Nixon (Nixon, 2016, p.xiii)
"This process - of story, ethnography, lateral thinking, translation and prototyping, testing and refining - is the foundation of strategic design."
- Bob Schwartz (Schwartz, 2016, p.xii)
The initial idea of strategic design was incubated at least 50 years ago, triggered by the Cold War period, as indicated in Nobel prize winner Herb Simon's "The Sciences of the Artificial". Simon thought designing was essential in converting current circumstances into preferred situations. More importantly, he inspired and guided design educators and researchers to expand their vision to a higher level, accelerating a breakthrough in connecting design with business practices in solving complex problems. (Simon, 1996).
Another Milestone set by the chairman of IDEO, Tim Brown, in 2008 has led to a continuous discussion about applying design thinking to traditional business strategy in Harward Business Review(Brown, 2008). A series of articles published in HBR offered a new perspective to leaders in business that encouraged them to take a more human-centred approach and embrace a design-centric culture in organisations. It raises industry awareness of the value of design in the corporate context(Kolko,2015).
In 2016, Natalie W. Nixon wrote the book Strategic Design Thinking: Innovation in Products, Services, Experiences, and Beyond, collecting the voices of leading design leaders, thinkers and researchers to share the integration of design and business. Nixon provided more explicit guidance for either decision drivers in business or designers in the strategic design realm in terms of emphasising using hybrid thinking in the entrepreneurial process with design approaches and methodologies(Nixon, 2016).
Strategic design sits at the intersection of design and business perspectives. Jeanne Liedtka also supported this point of view in Nixon's book. She concluded that designers value the human experience and evaluate each circumstance according to individual truth with an answer of "better" or "worse". Interestingly, as for business thinking, it will always be a "right" or "wrong" answer to judge the "truth" based on quantitative data and precise analysis. However, it revealed the fact that "business and design have so much to offer each other", as Liedtka said. The interrelationship between these two perspectives of thinking is why strategic design exists.
On the one hand, designing expands possibilities with actual users and embraces changes that can be seen as opportunities and sources of inspiration rather than risks. On the other hand, business sets up constraints to design while ensuring value creation for customers within time and cost limits. (Liedtka, 2016)
To find about more: I have explored more about the role of a Strategic Designer in my recent research project: The Future of Strategic Design Education. 