Dan Hill

Strategic design is about applying the principles of traditional design to "big picture" systemic challenges such as healthcare, education and the environment. It redefines how problems are approached and aims to deliver more resilient solutions. In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the messy politics - the "dark matter" - taking place above the designer's head. And that may mean redesigning the organisation that hires you.

A Strategic Design Vocabulary

Dark Matter and Trojan Horses

Karolina

The design planner and teacher Hugh Dubberly has suggested that "seeing patterns, making connections, and understanding relationships” are in fact the essence of design. Yet few designers would see that their design challenge is to understand, and often reorient, those relationships.

The design function need not be expanded, but strategic design is predicated on a different position within the organisation's decision-making apparatus. Strategic design must be embedded within the heart of the organisation, in order to be able to perceive how the entire organisation operates (this is a system) and move freely across the intersection of its elements, and to have the agency to suggest and enact a reorientation of the organisation.

It is not enough to just have the idea. Stratery must be connected to delivery, and it is design that enables stewardship.

As opposed to particular content expertise, focused within a bounded discipline, strategic design's discipline is in integrative systems thinking rather than a form of path dependency, and is able to move freely across disciplines rather than within them, revelling in the complexity of a more holistic understanding of the system.

As opposed to creating the intervention or one-off, strategic design's interests are in the replicable and systemic, and thus require engaging with the dark matter of organisations, policy, culture and other forms of context.

As opposed to traditional design practice, strategic design attempts to move beyond products, services and spaces into relationships, contexts, and strategies, yet without losing sight of the symbiotic relationship between meta and matter, and genuinely engaging with the public and civic as much as with the commercial.

Strategic design tries to ally pragmatism with imagination, deliver research through prototyping, enable learning from execution, pursue communication through tangible projects, and balance strategic intent and political capital with iterative action, systems thinking and user-centredness.

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