Sam I Am, Strategic Designer

Last week I wrote about hybrid modes of practice and the need to move between analytical and embodied ways of knowing. I still don’t know what to call this kind of work, and at the risk of further abstraction have provisionally adopted the term strategic design, complimented by applied foresight. These terms are a bit opaque, so I’m going to unpack them and say more about how I arrived here, starting with design and continuing with foresight next week.

Strategic design is one of those dialectical moves I critiqued in the last post, defined as much by what it’s not as what it might be. Many attempts at staking out the territory take this route—for example suggesting that unlike the older disciplines focused on concrete artifacts (simple, formal, tactical), strategic design is focused on systems-level change and complex, multi-stakeholder problem spaces. Systemic Design and Transition Design are variations on the theme, as is the work of Dark Matter Labs and the short-lived Helsinki Design Lab (HDL).

The story of HDL is recounted in Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary (Hill, 2012), where Dan Hill argues that—in order to take on complex social and environmental problems—design must necessarily address the “dark matter” of complex human systems, while employing “Trojan Horses” (design projects, prototypes, etc.) as a way in, and as a means of re-framing problems and prospective solutions.

According to the HDL website:

Helsinki Design Lab helps government leaders see the "architecture of problems." We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working—we call it strategic design.

HDL is where I first encountered the term in the 2010s, and since then I have been on a mission to re-imagine my practice via strategic foresight. Until recently I had forgotten about the second part of Hill’s thesis—that design artifacts play a key role in advancing transformation at a level of addressable granularity in the system you aim to change (this is my re-frame, inclusive of complexity). In other words, you have to prototype things in the real world and see what happens. This, because change is nonlinear and you cannot know in advance; and, you can only do this in terms of specific constraints and affordances in context. To do this effectively means that design must occupy a hybrid role, capable of shifting focus between different viewpoints, from whole systems to ground level and various points in between, as well as across diverse stakeholders and groups.

For HDL, that meant combining human-centered design with systems praxis, using the built environment as a Trojan Horse. For example, the Low2No project:

“…originates from our belief that a gradual and iterative transition from low carbon to no carbon city building is a more viable and resilient approach to the sustainability challenge than building new eco-cities on uncontested ground. The model, and its first iteration in a city block in downtown Helsinki test the regulatory, financial and cultural barriers to low carbon building, and work to overcome them through targeted projects, investments, events and partnerships. For instance, one of the project’s early successes was to work with the authorities to make multi-story timber construction legal in Finland, providing future projects with the possibility to use low carbon building materials, whilst opening a new market to the Finnish forest industry.”

One thing I like about this approach is that it retains a recognizable design ethos even as it crosses into territories like policy, finance, and governance. So, rather than applying design thinking to these issues in a superficial or temporary way, it aims to embed design in a collaborative context as a full participant, where designers of varied backgrounds can bring a unique complement of skills to a long-term problem space, aligned to an explicit theory of change.

My re-frame—along with the integration of foresight—seeks to prototype an evolution of design practice aligned to innovation in complex human systems amid high levels of turbulence and uncertainty (in other words, the present). Putting the pieces together, they are: applied foresight to anticipate and envision alternative futures, complexity science to make sense of the present, and strategic design to envision solutions and catalyze action.

And yet these same ambitions are also what makes strategic design a hard sell outside the sort of rare government sponsorship HDL enjoyed from 2008-2013 (and then, less than five years). This is partly because design services tend to be employed in relation to two things: a sponsor that wants something made and the means of production associated with making it, having decided in advance what constitutes the problem and solution space. Thus the dominant mode of design practice is near-term, unilateral, and tactical, while the most significant problems of our time are long-term, multilateral, and systemic.

This misalignment makes strategic design an outlier in more ways than one. In pitching these ideas to designers, collaborators, and prospective sponsors the most common response has been a mix of curiosity (most people recognize complex problems and can appreciate the need for new approaches), confusion (it still seems rather academic and theoretical), doubt (are there any case studies?), and a lack of fit (the approach does not align with immediate or foreseeable priorities of the organization).

All of which leaves me wondering about the viability of the discipline (if it can be called that) as well as the label, which remains provisional. Both remain my best attempt at how to structure a future-focused practice that can create meaningful change.

Further Reading

For a more detailed, insider’s view of HDL, this paper by Bryan Boyer is worth your time: Helsinki Design Lab Ten Years Later