But the way we exist in time is different than our everyday perception of existence. We live our lives surrounded by a world that largely seems permanent to us. Buildings, mountains, and rivers are entities that last longer than our lifetimes and we see them as always being there.

But if we look closer, none of these things are lasting entities. The world is not frozen and permanent. Everything lasts only for a little while before it transforms into something else. A carpet, you and me, a tree, a government, an island. Things are not things, things are processes, events.

One of the most interesting and approachable scientific books on time I’ve read is Carlo Rovelli’s “The order of Time” (the author is an amazing storyteller, given that the book is about quantum physics). Chapter 6 is entirely dedicated to this problem, and Carlo gives a beautiful example of how a simple stone is not a thing, but a process:

The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is, in reality, a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception—and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality.

Think about anything that exists, really, and you’ll see that everything is an event.

Design can adopt this worldview. If we zoom out from the present moment, our narrow daily scopes, and fast-paced environments that rush us into delivery, we can gain much more comprehensive, long-term perspective on what we’re bringing into the world. How the things-events that we’re designing unfold over time, and what change they bring to the world. We could be more conscious about how things-events exist, at least for a little while.

In “normal” conditions, when we go to work we have, what Japanese monk Shunmyo Masuno calls gates. When we leave for work in the morning, our first gate is the boundary of our home. When we get on a bus or bike, that’s the second gate. Coming to the office is the third one. The same gates are there when we go back from work. They help us decompress and leave the work behind.

But when there are no physical boundaries between work and home, we can create them in our minds.

I struggled at the beginning of the pandemic as everyone else, but then I quickly established my gates, and my stress and anxiety levels went down significantly. My first gate is when I close my laptop and sit quietly, meditate for several minutes to let my mind decompress. Then I change clothes and go for a short walk with my partner, regardless of weather conditions. That’s the second gate. When I get back home, I pass my third gate and spend the rest of the day with kids, playing my guitar, or doing chores. Gates change over time, and that’s fine – as long as I deliberately maintain them through various activities.

Try establishing the three gates, both in the morning and after work. It might help you to bring back the balance in your life.

User-centric and other anthropo-centric frameworks often gravitate towards select humans and their immediate needs, sometimes even at the expense of the society and the ecosystem. Commercially-bounded design should especially be held responsible.

In reality, we’re not designing only for the experiences of the end users who interact with our creations. No matter who we optimize for, our creations will affect other people, non-humans, and non-living structures that we might depend on. The boundaries that we draw around people or spaces are artificial and arbitrary. The reality doesn’t care about our boundaries. It will respond to our creations in its wholeness, cascading the effects of our work throughout the entire system.

To be able to design responsibly, we need to be mindful of the interconnectedness of everything and think beyond the present moment and into the future, and beyond isolated users to entire (eco)systems that we might affect.

My intention here is not to offer a definition of strategic design. Instead, I would like to explore it from my own, specific angle. This is more a contemplation and reflexion on my own practice and an attempt to make sense of it. Therefore, you are free to call out bullshit on this piece, challenge it or contribute to it. I am open for discussion, more than anything else.

Strategic design is often defined as an emerging discipline that uses design principles and practice to address complex, interrelated problems. It is multidisciplinary (or even contra-disciplinary: cutting across well-established borders) because it borrows from and fuses different disciplines, practices and methods – management, traditional design, architecture, foresight, systems thinking, to name just a few. The applications of strategic design vary: it can be used to influence strategic decision making in organizations, define a business model, set a corporate vision, identify new business opportunities, and make interventions (through strategy, products, services or policies) that create positive outcomes for people, organizations and the environment. We know that yesterday’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems; thus, I prefer to use the term intervention instead of solution because it is a more humble stance acknowledging that complexity can hardly ever be solved.

Beyond business design

While strategic design is successfully applied in the business context, it is also used to address larger problems in education, healthcare, government, and can even be used to fight climate change. The focus is not only on the benefits for business, but also on the benefits for people and the environment. The goal of strategy should be materialization of sustainable solutions – not only in the present but also in the future. Instead of using purely profit-driven goals and business KPIs as measurements, we should be using more comprehensive measurements, such as the triple bottom line. Here, the profit of the company would be a happy side effect, as Steve Jobs used to say.

Research

A starting point for strategic design is understanding the context – market, trends, users, customers, partners, internal and external stakeholders, and their behavior, motivations, values, and needs. The information can come from the organization and from the field, of course, and would most likely require cross-disciplinary effort. Designers should be familiar with qualitative and quantitative research methods, preferably with ethnography and its application in design.

Solving big-picture problems

Strategic problem solving is different to everything we traditionally associate with anything that has design in the title. The primary concern shifts away from pixels, screens, products, and individual experiences, to organizational dynamics, market strategies, delivery of products and services, business models, sustainability, cultures, communities, and so on. There is always a larger cultural, societal and environmental context around what the organization delivers, and it is within this space that strategic design operates. Dan Hill describes this space as dark matter, and as an astrophysics aficionado, I particularly love that metaphor. Unlike the matter which is visible and tangible, dark matter is invisible, impalpable and its existence can be perceived only through the effect it has on matter. While other design disciplines address the matter, strategic design addresses the dark matter and balances constantly between dark matter and matter.

Future-oriented decision making

Helping organizations to navigate an ever-increasing uncertainty and make good decisions about their future is one of the most important goals for strategic design. In the 21st-century world, traditional methods and thinking are not enough to solve complex, interwoven problems. Our institutions, policies (and whole industries) were designed in and for a bygone era and are ill-equipped to address the problems of today. On the bright side, the future is yet unwritten, and so design can help organizations explore the plurality of futures and design for the one in which we can not only survive multiple crises but also thrive. This is why strategic design, in my opinion, has to have more than business-as-usual in mind. It has to positively influence the future and everything that is contained within it.

This should come naturally to design because it is a discipline that inherently lives in the future. The design is, in a practical sense, a future-making discipline. Sadly, it sometimes lives in the present, focusing on prettifying what has already been decided, thus contributing to waste, and an avalanche of unintended consequences and externalities. This is where Speculative Critical Design and its provocative and critical nature can play a crucial role. I’ve seen immense benefits of using speculative design methods in the business domain to move conversations away from business KPIs, obsession with technological advancements, and pure usability to exploring alternative futures and alternative ways of being, with the goal to inform the decision making. And alternatives to current dystopian outlook is exactly what we need.

The holistic, systemic approach

As the complexity of the world increases, optimizing the system rather than its isolated parts becomes an imperative. Apart from current crises that are immensely complex and threaten the existence of humanity, businesses too are becoming complex and intertwined with the social, economic, and political fibers of society (Facebook is just one recent example). Strategic design considers many moving parts and their relationships, and tries to understand where and how to make interventions that influence positive outcomes. Therefore, the strategic designer has to have a solid understanding of how complex systems work, how to make sense of them and how to make a change. This is where I think systems thinking blends well with strategic design and provides a set of tools complementary to the designer’s toolbox. For instance, I’ve successfully used tools such as causal loop diagramming as an output of design synthesis and to identify problems in organizational dynamics.

Facilitation and orchestration

Strategic design is a team effort where success depends on the ability of the designer to work with multiple stakeholders. The role of the strategic designer is to involve, align and coordinate people with different agendas, priorities, and visions towards reaching the same goal. Even though the designers are not always trained to successfully facilitate different types of conversations, this skill is crucial to the role. Design facilitates and manages the process of co-creating value with the people with different backgrounds, interests, and knowledge and blends their unique points of view. Its role is to act as the “organizational glue” between different units, departments, and silos. Thus, as a horizontal function, design is in a position to connect disparate dots inside the organization – people, knowledge, processes, structures – and manage the delivery of strategic initiatives.

Knowledge transfer

Design alone is not sufficient to make profound changes. It is but one discipline that can contribute to the success of an organization. However, the organization as a whole can greatly benefit from design methods and thinking. Building design capabilities and transferring the knowledge and skills to other functions, amplifies the value and impact of design. While this requires a lot of time and effort (and patience), it is an important aspect of our work.

Generalism

I believe that a strategic designer needs to be a generalist, which should come naturally for many. The strength of a strategic designer is in understanding, mixing, and cross-pollinating compatible (and even incompatible?) disciplines. A strategic designer is an integrator, a fusionist. Rather than specializing in one discipline, they specialize in navigating ambiguity, uncertainty and the unknown. Personally, I prefer being in the liminal space between boundaries, combining and mixing principles and methods from research, systems thinking, speculative design, management, business design, and traditional design. After all, boundaries that we’ve set in our practices and organizations are man-made constructs and are imagined. If they are imagined, they can be reimagined and we’re free to cross them and get inspiration from across horizons.

Resources

Here are a few reads I’d like to share.

• Helsinki lab has a good brief explanation of strategic design.
• I like Diego Mazo’s take on the strategic design practice.
• Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary book had a big an influence on my thinking.
• Strategic design book is a good source to get started and learn the essentials.
• Business Model Generation describes how to create and innovate a business model.

Special thanks to Milica for helping me to go through the dark matter of this essay.

If you’re open for a chat about strategic design, I’d be happy to chat over a coffee or skype. Get in touch.

You don’t have to involve them fully in your project, but just enough so that they’ve been heard. And you might also get new and better ideas from cross-functional collaborators. Nobody wants to feel left out, and when they do feel that way, they object.

It’s well known that people will support you more when you engage them than when you just present to them. When you involve them, you’ll spend less time explaining, presenting, and convincing.

Then I moved onto more difficult chords, bar chords, and power chords. After a month I was able to play some of my favorite rock songs, though simpler ones. In total, that was around 300 minutes or 5 hours of practice. I am now enjoying learning more complex songs.

This experience reminded me of something important that easily eludes us in our noisy lives filled with instant gratification. Doing small things every day for longer periods of time can yield amazing results – with small efforts. At the beginning of my new notebook, I wrote a reminder to myself: keep it small and be persistent.

Don’t give your first idea any love. Think of it as just one option rather than a complete idea. If you treat it like one possibility you will be inclined to find other possibilities. Alternative ideas. Many of them. An opposite of your first idea, for instance. Frame it in a different perspective and explore it in a different context. Try a bizarre version of it. If an idea hasn’t been taken to unusual places, it hasn’t been explored enough. One question can have many answers, so go broad and go wild and go beyond obvious. Restrain from judgment, just keep going.

A time for judgment will come later, when you will need to converge from many alternative ideas to the strongest one. But to get to that strongest one you will first need many ideas to compare, build upon and combine. You first need to create choices in order to be able to make the right one.

We have a natural tendency to convergent thinking, especially in groups. We’re more exposed to it in our lives. Unlike divergent thinking which is messy and ambiguous, convergent thinking is logical and accurate. The greatest ideas come out of a messy process in which you bounce between divergent and convergent thinking along the way to the final idea. Ultimately, that’s what differentiates brilliant from mediocre.

It also wants to inform me, notify me, engage me, remind me, suggest to me, send me newsletter, access my phonebook, know my location, access my location, follow my every step, blind me with ads, target ads for me, block my ad-blocker for me. Get my data, store my data, use my data, sell my data, feast off of my data.

It wants to isolate me, imprison me, keep me addicted to its shiny plastic and pixels. Sell me a new version, not much different from the version I have. Only more expensive. It wants to be in my hands, in my head, in my vein, on my wrists, over my eyes. It wants me to hold it, touch it, stare at it, sleep with it, talk to it, because I don’t know how to talk to people anymore. It wants me to take photos of a moment instead of enjoying it. To eat news for breakfast, software updates for lunch and promotional emails for dinner. To type a message to a person next to me. To use emojis instead of language. To drive me around, to drive me crazy, to drive me far away from reality. To do things instead of me until I atrophy – physically, mentally and socially.

To calcify my empathy. To cement my senses. To vehemently fill my insides until there’s noting humane left inside my skin. And to apply filters to my dry skin shell so that I don’t see how ugly it has become.

With each new book I read, I change. Some books make me laugh, some make me feel depressed and some can achieve both. Design books that I read every single day make me feel more confident and more excited about my job. In this sense, there’s no difference between a book and an ebook.

But when I buy a physical book, it starts to live a life of its own. After reading it for days or weeks, the book changes. It’s not brand new anymore. It looses the smell of a new book (luckily, most of that wonderful smell is being inhaled by me). Edges of papers lose their sharpness. Cover becomes slightly bent and you can tell it was read just by looking at it. When I put a book on a shelf it becomes a part of the space I live in and it continues to change over time. It becomes a reminder that all the things with ephemeral beauty represent the life itself. This transience and decay of things around me remind me that I should use every moment of my life since I will go through the same lifecycle as that book.

Bookshelf is one of the most important parts of our home and it takes a central place in the living room. The wooden shelf also changes over time and has its own aging marks. That part of my home is my tranquility. From time to time, my wife and I love to rearrange the books and by doing that we enliven our living space and get in touch with things that have changed meanwhile. The oldest book that we have was printed in 1914!

With an ebook, as with any other digital good, there’s no such relationship. Ebooks will always look and feel the same, stored in some folder, away from my eyes and hands. Ebook is not part of my life in the same way a book is. I can have this relationship with the device I use to read an ebook, but not with the ebook itself. All digital goods, be it ebooks, software, documents or images give me a sense of permanency and immutability. They are sterile. And that sterility prevents me from getting in touch with transience and gives me a sense of timelessness. Which is just an illusion.

It is not the question of is one better than the other. I will continue to read both physical and digital books as I was doing so far. It is just that I still can’t find the right place for digital goods in my life.

Frequency

Software crash doesn’t have to be the only reason for data loss. Sometimes the internet connection breaks or user simply presses the wrong button – she closes Firefox window instead of one tab. This means that autosave should happen often enough to minimize the effect of unpredictable events. Alan Cooper suggests that, if possible, autosave should be performed after each keystroke or, in other case, when user stops interacting with the interface. When choosing autosave frequency one should always consider application performance and responsiveness, though.

Enable autosave by default

If an application implements autosave, it should be enabled by default. If autosave isn’t enabled, chances are that beginners and perpetual intermediaries will never discover it. I believe I fall into  intermediaries when it comes to Inkscape and I didn’t even know it has autosave. But it has autosave functionality which is disabled by default. And since it crashes quite often, it happens that I lose hours of work. Although I am trigger-happy when it comes to saving, I tend to be carried away with design work and simply forget to save.

Unobtrusiveness

Besides this, autosave should be unobtrusive, which means that it should be performed in background without interrupting user’s work. Here’s an example of how things can go wrong for users when autosave isn’t unobtrusive. I was typing an extremely important email in my webmail client when suddenly a green message box appeared – the same message box which appears after email is successfully sent. I instantly started to look for cancel/discard action and pressed it once I found it. Only seconds after I realized that was an autosave message. But the draft was deleted and I was quite frustrated.

Among many others, Google Docs is another example of obtrusiveness – after each autosave the cursor moves to the top of the text. I am sure this is a bug that will be solved but currently it is obviously more than annoying. Besides this bug, Google docs is a good example of how autosave should be done.

When document isn’t saved there is information about the last save and enabled Save button next to it. After autosave the message changes and Save button become disabled. Also, autosave is being performed after each keystroke which eliminates the need for “Do you want to save changes?” popups.

A problem

However, autosave raises one important question – with each save, all previous versions of the same document become unavailable (undo can sometimes be helpful but not enough). Autosave overwrites the same document over and over again. For instance, user might want to edit some template and just print it without saving it at any moment, but autosave might overwrite the template. Some applications use versioning to fix this issue (by adding timestamp to a file name for example). Some, on the other hand, keeps the history of actions where each action refers to one of the previous document versions. But those solutions tends to be complicated and seems as if there’s no definite solution to this problem.

In any case, if you are not sure about autosave functionality, don’t think anymore and implement it – and keep the common save functionality and unavoidable keyboard support.