Strategic Design Practice

Design researchers and educators are increasingly asked to equip design students with state-of-the-art knowledge, skills and competences that transcend design disciplines’ traditional form giving domains to build students’ collaborative capabilities for designing and executing organizational processes of strategy framing and reframing.

Key reasons for this new imperative are rooted in recent decades’ increased interests in design as a driver of innovation and change. Furthermore, new developments in technology and labor market structures are putting pressure on designers’ abilities to meet such demands and counter current tendencies of precarization. 

As the main driving motive of this project, current research literatures unfortunately lack well-described positions and frameworks for developing designers’ professional value propositions in the marketplace for strategic design services. Through research designs informed by traditions of action research and ‘research through design’ methodologies and epistemologies this project aims to explore which and how collaborative design practices may aid organizational actors coming together from across hierarchies and functions in collectively making sense of actionable ways for co-developing and co-implementing organizational strategies.