Strategic Design: Achieving Utopian Goals

Using strategic design often helps companies and organisations to achieve better results than they would have been able to achieve by simply improving the existing conditions or products. But it takes courage to think along new lines and aim high, says a design researcher.

By Anna Krarup Jensen

Design discipline involves two levels: an executive level and a strategic level, says Associate Research Professor at the Danish Centre for Design Research Thomas Dickson, who works at the Aarhus School of Architecture.

The executive level refers to the classic design disciplines such as furniture, industrial and graphic design. Strategic design, on the other hand, is about overall problem-solving, method, planning and management.
“An example of strategic design might be a company or an organisation that uses design to discover and develop new business opportunities and approaches,” says Thomas Dickson, adding:
“Designers are trained to imagine things that don’t exist yet and visualise them.”

NovoPen. When the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk developed this injection pen for people with diabetes, it exemplified how the strategic use of design opened new possibilities and put the company leaps and bounds ahead of its competition. Illustration: Novo Nordisk A/S

Innovative Leaps and Bounds
With strategic design, companies are often able to enhance their competitiveness considerably. Being a leader requires the courage to think entirely new ideas, says Thomas Dickson.

He explains that much of the innovation that normally occurs is incremental innovation.
“Incremental innovation is the refinement and improvement of what already exists. This type of innovation occurs, for example, as minor improvements and the redesign of existing products. However, if an organisation really wants to be a leader in their field, at some point they’ll have to deliver radical innovation in the form of fundamentally new ideas,” he says.

As an example of strategic design leading to radical innovation, Thomas Dickson mentions the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. In the 1980s, the company developed NovoPen, an injection pen that made it much simpler for people with diabetes to manage the doses of insulin they needed to take in connection with their meals.
“Instead of focusing exclusively on continuing their refinement of the insulin, i.e. incremental innovation, Novo Nordisk put themselves in the user’s shoes and focused on the actual need of a person with diabetes, which was to be able to take the right dosage at the right time. This was the first time that Novo Nordisk approached their pharmaceutical development as a design process instead of a scientific process. And when marketing people and the strategic management of Novo Nordisk together applied methods that normally belong to the designer’s universe, they were able to create an entirely new concept that put them leaps and bounds ahead of their competition,” says Thomas Dickson.

The Strategically Designed Society
Not only individual companies can benefit from embracing strategic design. Society at large can also be made the object of strategic design, to everyone’s benefit.
“There are lots of areas that Denmark would like to take on. But to achieve a real effect, we should give up traditional thinking, where we simply continue to pour money into improving existing features. We have to break with the past in order to build a new future. We have to aim for Utopian results,” says Thomas Dickson.

As an example he mentions the Danish health sector, which the Aarhus School of Architecture is currently working with to develop proposals for a strategic design solution.
“In 10-20 years, efforts to prevent and cure lifestyle diseases will play an even greater role, and that requires a strategic rethinking of the entire health care sector already now,” says Thomas Dickson.

Previously, design was not important for the way a company was run. Over the years, designers entered the management level. Now that design is incorporated on the strategic level, it may be the catalyst for corporate innovation and development. Illustration: Thomas Dickson

Visionary Design Research

Strategic design has a great potential. Whether it is realised is a matter of ambition levels, says Thomas Dickson. Do we dare to think new ideas and take the consequences of the resulting insights? He has no doubt that the design discipline is developing in a direction where the strategic level takes on ever greater importance.
“It’s not that the same individuals should necessarily master both the executive and the strategic level. But I think that the design institutions have to be visionary and incorporate strategic design in both education and research,” he says, adding
“Researchers should not only cooperate with other scientific institutions but increasingly also with companies, NGOs and the government sector in addressing specific needs. Research needs to interact more directly with the surrounding environment. That’s the way forward.”

Illustration on front page: NovoPen ® Junior, Novo Nordisk A/S