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Strategic Design vs. Design Strategy
The case for designers doing when everyone is design thinking
In Travis J. Brown’s article “Strategic Design or Design Strategy? Effectively Positioning Designers as Strategists,” from April 2019, he questions the lack of perceived value of design in the context of business. As strategists, he says, “there appears to be increasing pressure on designers to distance themselves from design doing (i.e., being concerned with aesthetic considerations, visual articulation, and artifact creation.)” The myth is that, in order to assimilate as a business professional, the designer must be practical and not aesthetic.
The door is open to question whether, when we say design strategy, we are referring only to design thinking or embracing the full spectrum of design doing. To best represent the value that designers can bring as strategists to business challenges, our terminology matters. Brown discusses the difficulty of defining both strategic design and design strategy. His article describes a process he undertook in his Indiana University classroom to provide definitions for these terms.
