Strategic Design & Leadership
An Introduction
To understand Strategic Design, we need to address three fundamental concepts:
- Design Parity;
- Design Maturity;
- Design Leadership.
1- Design Parity:
According to Juliana Proserpio, chief designer and co-founder at Echos Innovation Lab, "Design has reached a new level of sophistication in the marketplace. A Design of anything from the facade of a shop front to a logo or an app has reached equal levels of appeal. Design around the world has matured, and through this process of growth and rapid adaptation, it has begun to reach parity."
She continues, "However, there is a problem when everyone has equally good Design. It begins to look the same and indistinguishable from each other. Designers need to push their products and services to new levels to delight their audiences. The expectations have risen, and now designers need to use their leadership skills to push the envelope."
Since technology became an intrinsic drive to every organisation worldwide, Design is no longer a differentiator for products and campaigns. Technology without Design can't interact with people. Design can translate what people desire and decode it to business viability.
Design has become a strategic element to every organisation that strives to protect its clients. Design excellence is a highly competitive force in the marketplace. According to Thomas Lockwood, the point of differentiation is where "companies in which embed design as part of their corporate strategy". Strategic Design is the means to level up and excel throughout this game.
2- Design Maturity
The design industry has matured. The old and good Bauhaus in which we learnt how to challenge the creations for an industrialising world no longer exists. In the last two decades, Design has moved from creative studios and art schools, flooding not only business schools but also traditional organisations, which led to the assembly of internal design capabilities for innovation.
Large enterprises or global consultancies acquired small to large design studios worldwide. Design has reached a new level in the game that is no longer a luxury; it is a need (and great strategic designers are missing). The C-doors are open for designers to excel at their best.
Large enterprises are not hiring only freelance or a few full-time designers. They are hiring hundreds of designers and their specialisations. According to Richard Buchanan, there are four design orders: visual and symbols, products and artifacts, services and interaction and ultimately, systems and environments. Design has evolved from arts and crafts to the possibility of solving the most pressing problems we face today. More than that, we still have to evolve from a human-centred approach to a life-centred approach — which means every living thing on this planet. We must open the strategic design practice to enable this long-range vision.
3- Design Leadership
Our future will be defined by the decisions we make today. We don't need to go much deeper to understand despite the fact we made significant achievements as a society, we have left a few things behind us.
Design leaders can switch between different tasks and roles, such as helping build a broad design vision for their organisation, understanding how best to manage a design team, and acting as a design practitioner to maintain and teach the best practices within their group.
Design leaders prepare the design ladder, defining roles and the appropriate capabilities to the team and the business. Design leaders can help determine what quality means for the team, stakeholders, business, and society. By doing that, designers can excel in their roles to strive for the better.
Three fundamental aspects make a great design leader — first, design leaders are humanistic leaders; they strive to empathise and understand people deeply. Design leaders are passionate about people and their behaviours. This is why empathy became a practice among the design community; without it, you can't excel in your designs. Design is about deeper human understanding; more than market research, it requires a holistic appreciation for people's needs. The second fundamental aspect of a design leader is creativity. Engaging in the collaborative process without consensus and creating something is the trick that great designers pull from. Creativity is not only a process but an essential craft ability to materialise things around us.
And last but not least, imagination is an essential skill or ability to dream what is possible. Without the ability to dream something, we are trapped into existing narratives, biases and beliefs. The fundamental skill of imagining futures can unleash us to different realities.
Fundamental elements for Strategic Design
Design is different from Design Thinking.
A simplified definition of Design taught at design schools around describes the discipline of Design as an intentional and planned outcome to produce the look, functions and working of something. To design is the act of making, building and constructing according to plan. In the design community, this definition alone is not enough; that is why if we want to keep designing incredible products, we need to democratise how designers think and work. That is where design thinking gets in.
In a nutshell, design thinking is the way designers think and do things. It is a process to articulate the voice of customers' needs and desires and deliver new value. Design Thinking has become a hot topic and a buzzword because of its novelty element and because it helps anyone in the world become the client's guardian internally. Also, it leverages creative collaboration within teams.
Design Thinking is the culture of Design — it helps design and innovation teams articulate and generate new value for any organisation. Design thinking helps anyone talk the language of customers' perspectives in an accessible way. Who would be against the client's perspective today?
Design without the design culture (design thinking) is hard to understand, relate to, experience, and feel like a designer. We need designers-designers and non-designers designers to translate, articulate and implement the power of Design within any organisation.
Design is about Diversity and Inclusion.
Every time we define a group of personas and stakeholders within a project, we consciously decide who is in and who is out of this project. This practice is quite powerful and objective if we try to speed up your creations. Typically we are always trying to make things faster for a variety of reasons, and I believe I don't need to list here.
But we have to be aware of that. More and more, our creations impact, if not thousands, millions of people and our planet. We have to be aware what we are designing is based on the premises of the actual society, on paradigms, on biases, on specific values, moral and ethically speaking. Designers are responsible for its creation by challenging the "global colonial matrix of power" (MIT Design Issues, volume 38, number 1 winter 2022).
In achieving high orders of Design, we need to be aware of the variety of users and living things interacting around it. We need to understand the power of a plurality of voices that impact our outcomes.
Design is not about capability only; Design is about excellence.
Designers are operating within institutions and organisations for various reasons, but I would argue that they are there to excel in their creative abilities in achieving greatness. Otherwise, what is the reason to be the driving force of supporting new ideas and adding value to the organisation? Designers desire to facilitate change in the world, and they are creating their space by changing, by designing.
Yes, Design can be seen as a capability, but if you are only setting up a design capability within your organisation, you lose the opportunity to propel constant change. Designers are the driving force with adequate competencies to transform things around our planet.
Design is about collaborating without consensus.
According to Manuhuia Barcham, Design is a powerful decision process that " allows for the creation of agreed-on language and spaces of practice based on doing things together over time and by enabling collaboration without consensus on areas of mutual concern". Design gives the power of choice, the power of imagining how things ought to be.
Designers need to decide how to craft future value propositions for the next 10–15 years that will be in line with market needs.
According to Marco Bevolo, "Design has the opportunity to redefine and explore the boundaries whereby the "society" at large, beyond "customers" and "shareholders" only, should be the centre of design visions. This approach naturally leads to systemic and strategic directions with multi-stakeholders at the heart of complex scenarios".
Well, design thinking, inclusiveness, excellence and collaboration are essential elements for strategic designers to start theorising, strategising and experimenting with Design in higher orders of our systems.
According to Anna Meroni,
"Strategic Design is about conferring to social and market bodies a system of rules, beliefs, values and tools to deal with the external environment, thus being able to evolve (and so to survive successfully) as well as maintaining and developing one's own identity. And, in doing so, influencing and changing the environment too."
Design is a gift; Design is powerful.
That is why design matters!
