The potential of design-driven foresight to support strategy articulation through experiential learning

Abstract

The turn of the 21st century has seen the burst of research on how design can support strategy formation and execution; however, little attention has been placed on the emerging field of design-driven foresight, that is the combined adoption of design and foresight methods to generate more immersive, experiential, and engaging representations of the future and inform strategy-making. This paper further unpacks this domain by examining the mechanisms that connect design-driven foresight with strategy articulation through relying on experiential learning. By drawing on a three-year research and innovation project, we illustrate how the relevant stakeholders make use of design-driven foresight processes while co-creating some interactive technologies needed to support crowdsourced curatorial processes in cultural heritage. The empirical evidence suggests how design-driven foresight, through co-creation workshops, can support experiential learning in the form of three distinct processes: favouring knowledge translation mechanisms, creating a safe space for learning-by-doing, and facilitating a multi-stakeholder conversation anchored to material and tangible work embedded in design artefacts. In turn, experiential learning can support processes of strategy articulation that emerge while stakeholders tinker with multiple exploitation pathways and progress through alternating phases of convergent and divergent thinking. Finally, it is argued that the plasticity and openness of design artefacts adopted in the context of foresight support forms of learning that will eventually foster processes of strategy articulation.