Reframing Strategic Design

Reframing Strategic Design

This program aims to develop and frame a new direction for research into strategic design specifically focused on how collaborative design practices may aid organizational change and transformation. 

Strategic design may be characterized as an emerging field of professional design practice as well as an emerging field of academic research in which theories from both design and business collide and integrate. In this emergent field of research, the role of designers and their designerly skills and mindsets, are typically theorized as a panacea for effectuating viable, feasible and desirable innovation. 

However, as this program strives to advance, strategic design as a practice of bringing about viable, feasible and desirable organizational change and transformations remain largely neglected in design research literatures. This leaves knowledge of the value of design in strategic issues of organizational sensemaking and decision making for adapting or proactively responding to market uncertainties as well as competing or even conflicting organizational values and goals under-explored and from a practice perspective under-utilized. 

This program strives to theorize and empirically build new epistemological avenues for pursuing research into strategic design. To this end we take a practice-based research perspective and draw from the co-design, design thinking, design management and science and technology studies literatures.