A pragmatic path for strategic design: Influences from industrial design, cognitive studies and management sciences

Leandro Miletto Tonetto,Guilherme Englert Corrêa Meyer,Fabiane Wolff,Filipe Campelo Xavier Da Costa

doi:10.4013/sdrj.2019.123.07

Leandro Miletto Tonetto, Guilherme Englert Corrêa Meyer + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.4013/sdrj.2019.123.07

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Abstract

Strategic design is a research field that was born in Italy, specifically at the Politecnico di Milano. Approaches with the same designation have been observed in other scientific communities, but they tend to be weakly in its theoretical perspectives. In this paper, an approach that derive from strategic design in its Italian roots is described, which is here broadly descried as pragmatic strategic design (PSD). The basis of the pragmatist view on this research field is explored, and the key characteristics of PSD are described. PSD is committed with real-life practical applications of Design in organizations. It privileges practice-based action, but extrapolates mere technical approaches, preferring to design product-service-systems. PSD is multidisciplinary. The variables that will be considered in the design are operationally described. It is concerned with user experience, since it represents a strategic issue for many organizations. It deals with intuition though metadesign. PSD is focused on for preferred outcomes, rather than for likely ones.Key-words: strategic design, pragmatic strategic design, pragmatic design, pragmatism.

Highlights

Strategic design was born at the Politecnico di Milano
Design has been moving away from a sole responsibility for a technical approach to products, revealing an investigation field defined as strategic design
KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF PRAGMATIC STRATEGIC DESIGN According to the influences described in chapter 2, it is possible to draw eight key characteristics of pragmatic strategic design (PSD)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Strategic design was born at the Politecnico di Milano. It allows organizations to develop their own identities, offering social and market bodies a system of values, beliefs, rules and tools to evolve and deal with the external environment, changing and influencing it (Meroni, 2008, p.32). Design is an interventionist discipline that seeks to bring about change by developing and staging artifacts and environments that alter how we perceive and act in these volatile conditions [...] The interventionist and transformative agenda of design resonates with the pragmatist tenet that practice-based action takes precedence over doctrines (Dalsgaard, 2014, p.148) To work in this complex market environment, pragmatic designers and researchers narrow down all variables that interfere in a project to only a few that are supposed to be the most impactful. E.g., to design for inspiration in education, the project may include aspects of the teaching method, environment, furniture, etc, which allow more ways of stimulating a particular experience (inspiration, in this case), than designing a sole material object In other fields, such as industrial engineering, the expression product-service-system is employed to describe an outcome that is not a single artefact, even though there is no notion of system that extrapolates an amount of unities (coherently) tied together. The most important influences to build the concept of PSD that is proposed in this paper are reviewed

INFLUENCES ON PRAGMATIC STRATEGIC DESIGN

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION