Champions of Strategic Design
Conversations with colleagues #1
In 2018, I joined a strategic design team in Arup with a remit to bring together cultural, spatial, and digital environments to help build a more holistic, balanced, and equitable world. My own background is in architecture and urbanism and, having studied the impact of urban planning on people and society, I was excited by the opportunity to work with multidisciplinary colleagues who shared my passion for people-centred, outcome-led design.
Since then, many countries (and even more cities) have declared a global climate emergency, the amount of people who are active on the internet has surpassed the amount of people who are not, and the gap between the world’s richest and poorest has continued to widen. And then there’s the coronavirus pandemic; a challenge with serious short-term costs and even greater, yet unknown, long-term consequences.
Three years ago, strategic design seemed like a useful approach to help solve especially complex challenges and wicked problems in organisations and society. Today, I don’t see how we can move forward by any other means.
The issues we face are intrinsically related. They are connected across individuals, communities, and populations, and they are shaped between the physical places we inhabit, the digital services we rely on, and our socioeconomic constructs. By focusing on the outcomes that we wish to achieve for people and the planet, and by using established design thinking methodologies to structure an interdisciplinary conversation, strategic design offers a way ahead for a more collaborative and collectively beneficial future.
By focusing on the outcomes that we wish to achieve for people and the planet, and by using established design thinking methodologies to structure an interdisciplinary conversation, strategic design offers a way ahead for a more collaborative and collectively beneficial future.
But strategic design is also a relatively new practice and its usefulness has yet to be widely recognised by the very people and organisations that need it the most. Furthermore, within most sectors, there is an urgent need for more strategic designers with a purpose and set of skills to think beyond the silo.
Therefore, in August 2020, I called up two colleagues — Chris Green and Oli Whittington, based in New York and London, respectively, to discuss our practice. How did we end up as strategic designers, what is strategic design, and why should the world care?
The following interview is a summary of our conversation.
Transcript from our conversation in August 2020
Me: Chris & Oli, thank you so much for agreeing to come together to talk openly about our strategic design practice. Would you mind beginning by introducing yourselves briefly to the readers?
Chris: Of course and thank you for having us. Today I’m a strategic designer, but I was trained as an architect. Working within architecture, I quickly became interested in other forces that were shaping the built environment beyond the design of buildings, specifically emerging technologies. I was looking for a space that allowed me to think holistically about space and technology, and that’s when I found Arup Digital Studio.
Oli: My academic background is in engineering design. Through this course, which was relatively new at the time, I learned systems thinking — studying a range of disciplines from product design to civil engineering to problem solve with a deep understanding of the wider system at play. When I joined Arup as a graduate, I was focused on the strategy and implementation of smart city solutions. I began to ask questions around the purpose of the solutions we were designing, which drove a desire to better understand the end-users. When I joined the Studio team, I started using the strategic design angle to combine systems thinking with human insights.
Me: “Strategic design” is a relatively new field — or at least, until recently, a relatively unknown field — and we’ve all come at it from more traditional built environment disciplines. Why do you think we should be considering the strategic design approach across fields such as architecture, design, and engineering?
Oli: For me, it is really that the built environment is the interface to our lives. At an individual level, it impacts our education, our health, how we work. From a systemic point of view, the physical environment really impacts the effectiveness of institutions and drives wider societal outcomes. Design can be a catalyst for this broader wave of change, and strategic design is a method to move across the various design scales, from the experience of an individual to the operations of the city.
Chris: I definitely agree with that. Put another way, cities are complex, but the design process has traditionally become a bit siloed. Strategic design offers a way forward and a platform for more holistic thinking to take place, which tackles complexity up front within a design process.
Me: So, to paraphrase slightly, the inherent complexity of cities and people calls for a complexity of skills to solve problems more holistically.
Chris: I think the skill sets that are useful for strategic design do exist in other areas. But what we’ve seen these past years and decades is a fragmentation of the design process that results in design teams being engaged too late in the process to have the kind of impact that they want to bring. And that is tied into the way contracts are shaped and how teams work together across the design stages. I think strategic design offers that space to work in a more holistic sense, and much earlier in the design process.
Oli: I guess in that sense as well, because it is new, it doesn’t have the constraints of methods or silos. Strategic designers are perhaps afforded more leeway in the types of things they are allowed to do or encouraged to think about.
Me: I feel that as well. The opportunity to be the dark horse in the room also gives you the opportunity to ask the questions that other people may not feel they have the scope to voice.
Chris: Another thing I would want to add is around the role of participation and the participatory design aspects of strategic design as a means to corral communities and stakeholders around a common goal and a common vision. Whether you are building a service or a piece of infrastructure, strategic design can help align client objectives with end user needs to deliver projects that work for all.
Whether you are building a service or a piece of infrastructure, strategic design can help align client objectives with end user needs to deliver projects that work for all.
Me: Thinking about communities and client objectives: You’re based in different regions, from the UK and Europe to the United States, and I’m wondering how you might experience this geographic difference in your work?
Chris: One observation I have made, is the increase in likelihood that you’ll work with private entities in the US compared to the UK.
Oli: That’s also the only thing that really jumps out to me as a major difference. In the UK, we’ve had quite a few municipally driven projects, while in the US, public/private partnerships are more common. I find with private clients that the commercial drivers tend to outweigh other drivers such as health, wellbeing, and the environment, though these are areas where strategic design can unlock the greatest value.
Chris: Though in working with private clients in the US, there’s also a lot of scope to help them think about the broader context of their projects beyond the financial incentives. There are quite a few developers and investors that own and operate assets at the scale of the city, and in those cases, it absolutely makes sense to think more holistically. We can help answer questions, such as, what are the strategic business objectives and how do they relate to broader urban challenges and user experience objectives?
Oli: I’ve also observed that businesses, probably driven by changing consumer expectations, have become more focused on the social, economic, and environmental impact of their products and services. As this social contract with customers and communities becomes increasingly synonymous for good business practices, we should see the application of strategic design widen.
As the social contract with customers and communities becomes increasingly synonymous with good business practice, we should see the application of strategic design widen.
Chris: Exactly. Part of the challenge with our kind of work is identifying clients that have these kinds of ambitions. Sometimes it takes just one person on the client side who sees the bigger picture, who can champion a more holistic approach and help build the capacity for strategic thinking within the organisation. Unfortunately, it varies greatly from organisation to organisation whether that person or team exists.
Me: You are saying that the collaborative spirit of strategic design extends to the very early stages of the project and to that initial client engagement and the capacity of the client.
Chris: That’s right.
Me: Could you talk a little bit more about the type of client that typically benefits from working with a strategic design team?
Chris: Everyone!
Oli: I think that, even though we have spoken about public and private, in a true strategic design project, governments are always best placed because they have interests that lie well beyond the service that they are delivering. They naturally have broader societal aims and serve people at a much wider scale. The UK government already has a pretty good service design practice, actually, which ensures that users are considered at a service-delivery level. There is scope to expand that thinking to make sure every project also works towards a greater, shared goal.
Chris: I think that’s true, and would also add that this applies to public institutions at large. The cultural infrastructures we have today are super important, especially in current times. It makes me think of institutions such as libraries that are often underfunded and overlooked, yet they play such a vital role in providing broader public services and community support beyond just being a library. I think strategic design has an important role to play there in terms of helping to build the case and value proposition for these institutions that don’t have a purely financial bottom line.
Me: Talking about financial bottom lines… The types of outcomes that strategic design unlock tend to be fairly long-term in nature. How does that square with a company’s — or indeed a government’s — need to prove short-term results?
Oli: That’s a really good question. Actually, one of the aims of strategic design is to work across these different timescales. In the short-term, it is about making the long-term goals tangible and real, but also about creating interventions that do have immediate results, which can help catalyse the long-term change.
Me: Do you have an example?
Oli: For example, our team worked with Transport for Wales. Some of the pieces that we talked about, although they were relatively small scale interventions around catering, when we connected each piece with the distribution along the railway line, suddenly there’s an opportunity to ignite local economies. Maybe there isn’t the capacity to deliver for the first years, but you create a story that can grow and that might result in cooking schools opening, local goods production, or even innovative delivery solutions in the long-term. There should always be that immediate effect which creates that really tangible piece.
Chris: I think that is also where strategic design and user experience (UX) design go hand in hand and really complement each other, in thinking about the systemic context of a problem, and how solutions can tangibly manifest. Thinking about where the challenges are, and where the opportunities are to respond. Identifying the breakages in the chain. And then using UX design as a means to intervene in that point in the chain by understanding why a linkage might be broken, what the problem might be at a human level, and then designing a response accordingly. That response can then create both short and long-term gains.
Strategic design is about identifying short-term interventions that can lead to long-term change.
Me: You’ve described a series of opportunities for strategic design to benefit public and private sector stakeholders alike. From a personal perspective, what do you hope to achieve through your strategic design practice?
Chris: I feel like it is a bit of a moving target. The world is constantly evolving, and I don’t think I could necessarily put my finger on a single goal or end state. There will always be new problems to solve and challenges to tackle. I think what would represent an element of success, more broadly speaking, would be increasing the capacity for strategic thinking on the client side, particularly in government and large-scale organisations. I think, having those advocates and champions on the client side makes for a stronger project. It puts a stronger will in the project. It puts more wind in the sails.
Oli: I like that as well. It is a good sign of success if the discipline itself is wider recognised, but also if the capabilities that we recognise become a more stable part of governments and international businesses so we can address the bigger systemic challenges, whether we’re talking about social inequality, climate change, or the natural environment. I think the world is moving that way naturally and that type of systemic thinking is becoming more mainstream. But there’s so much more to be done.
Chris: Without identifying specific interventions, I do think that this will also help create new forms of built environment, such as new architectural typologies and new types of spatial uses. I think the exploratory nature of this work can help unlock these new types of built form. We can’t possibly know what forms this will take, but that is certainly one of the impacts strategic design can have.
Me: And finally, what do you consider to be some of the barriers that might stand in your way to achieve the full impact of the strategic design approach?
Oli: Although systemic thinking is on the rise, I feel like long-term thinking is not necessarily imbedded across government. Particularly at the moment. I think that the case for strategic design and systemic thinking is sometimes hard to make, because there are more immediate pressures. And that’s a real challenge.
Chris: Another challenge is the way that projects are funded and structured. Some of the thinking and some of the approaches that we are talking about are synonymous with disciplines like architecture, but typically come in too late in the process.
Me: How so?
I’ve found working on projects and talking to project architects that they’ve been very supportive and engaged in the conversation beyond the building design — thinking about local mobility requirements, way-finding systems, these broader aspects — but the challenge is that it is not in their remit to propose solutions to these things, and it is not in their contractual obligations. If we can create the space, and with that the funding, to do this kind of work, this holistic mapping of broader design requirements, then that will be beneficial for sure.
Oli: Agreed.
Me: Thank you both for taking the time to discuss these opportunities and challenges with me. I feel that this conversation has helped us all become a bit more aware of the landscape we operate in, and hopefully other readers have been inspired by this glimpse into our practice as well.
Chris, Oli, and myself work in Arup’s strategic design and user experience design team in London and New York. Please reach out if you are interested in joining future conversations.
