Hill Dan - Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary.pdf

Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

ДАН ХИЛЛ
ТЕМНАЯ МАТЕРИЯ
И ТРОЯНСКИЕ КОНИ
СЛОВАРЬ СТРАТЕГИЧЕСКОГО ДИЗАЙНА
3-е издание (электронное)
Москва
«Стрелка Пресс»
2017
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

DAN HILL
DARK MATTER
AND TROJAN HORSES
A STRATEGIC DESIGN VOCABULARY
3-rd edition (electronic)
Moscow
Strelka Press
2017
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

УД К72
ББК85
H66
H66
Hill, Dan.
Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary = Тем-
ная материя и троянские кони. Словарь стратегического дизайна
[Электронный ресурс] / D. Hill. — 3-rd ed. (el.). — Electronic text
data (1 file pdf : 149 p.). — М. : Strelka Press, 2017. — System
requirements: Adobe Reader XI or Adobe Digital Editions 4.5 ;
screen 10".
ISBN 978-5-9903364-3-8
We live in an age of sticky problems, whether it’s climate change or the
decline of the welfare state. With conventional solutions failing, a new culture of
decision-making is called for. Strategic design is about applying the principles of
traditional design to «big picture» systemic challenges such as healthcare,
education and the environment. It redefines how problems are approached and
aims to deliver more resilient solutions. In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new
vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of
power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the
messy politics — the «dark matter» — taking place above the designer’s head.
And that may mean redesigning the organization that hires you.
УДК 72
ББК 85
The source print publication: Dark matter and trojan horses. A
strategic
desi
gn vocabulary
/ D. Hill. — Moscow : Strelka Press, 2014. —
148 p. — ISBN 978-0-9929-1463-9.
ISBN 978-5-9903364-3-8
© Strelka Institute for Media,
Architecture and Design, 2014
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

This essay is written from a personal perspective, though my
colleagues at Sitra’s Strategic Design Unit — Bryan Boyer, Justin W
Cook and Marco Steinberg — have been hugely influential in terms of
my thinking, and much of what follows is based on daily
conversations with them, as well as our projects. Numerous other
conversations with numerous other people, in and out of various
projects over the last 15 years, have also informed this essay. My
thanks to them too.
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
BACKDROP
When I started writing this essay, Athens was burning again.
Muammar Gaddafi had been killed the day before. Occupy Wall Street
was in its sixth week of protest in downtown Manhattan, its
participants growing in number every day such that it has effectively
become a curious melange of a functioning shanty town with celebrity
endorsement and global media presence, in what is a private space,
Zuccotti Park.
T he Occupy movement had spread worldwide, from small,
almost timid protests in my hometown of Helsinki, to violent
running battles with police on the streets of Rome. More than 950
cities took part in a coordinated global protest on 15 October 2011
across 82 countries, five months after the first Occupy protest in
Spain. Some 500,000 people took part in the 15 October protest in
Madrid alone (in Spain, almost half of all youth are unemployed).
Unified by the #occupy hashtag and the slogan “We are the 99%”,
the movement continues to grow.
A few months earlier, from 6 to 10 August 2011, many towns
and cities in the UK — mainly in London, Birmingham and
Manchester — suffered violent riots of a scale and ferocity that had
not been seen for a generation, if ever. While the UK was briefly
close to breakdown in the early 1980s, and had witnessed mass
protests and unrest many times before, the nature of the rioting,
looting and arson attacks in August was essentially unprecedented as
their cause was not clear.
— 6 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Whereas the earlier poll tax riots and miners’ strikes, for
example, had a clear ideological disagreement at their heart, these
riots seemed to be about something else. But what, exactly? After the
recriminations and finger pointing, we are no closer to an answer.
Explanations offered veer between feckless nihilism, moral
breakdown and consumer culture, through to the belief that an entire
generation has been systematically disenfranchised and discarded by
30 years of neoliberal social and economic policy. Either way, the
cause was so deeply embedded, so fundamental, as to appear beyond
the core capacity of government itself.
T his last year has also seen the Arab Spring unfolding across
north Africa, with T unisia and Egypt undergoing revolutions, Libya in
civil war, civil uprisings in Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, and numerous
other countries and states witnessing major protests — Algeria, Iraq,
Jordan, Morocco and Oman among them.
In July 2011, the USA was hours away from “shutting down
government”, due to its own inability to agree on appropriate levels
of federal government spending. T he episode is expected to be played
out again at the next opportunity.
Japan, the world’s third largest economy, careers from political
crisis to environmental disaster. T he world’s-largest-economy-in-
waiting, China, despite a millennium of practiced statecraft behind it,
still faces an awkward developmental road ahead, pitted with the
inequality and social unrest familiar to previous episodes of mass
urbanisation.
When I finished writing this piece, Occupy Wall Street was still
occupying Wall Street, despite the slowly falling temperatures.
Similarly Occupy movements around the world were continuing to dig
in. Yet it was Oakland, California that was now burning, because of
the increasingly violent clashes between the Occupy Oakland
— 7 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

protesters and police, after a 3000-strong march had more or less
shut down the fifth busiest port in the US.
Two days before, the G20 summit had failed to strike any kind
of deal to resolve the eurozone debt crisis. T he summit had been
described as a “make-or-break” moment.
It broke.
T he same day, the UK thinktank Demos published research
indicating that the far-right was on the rise across Europe. T he
Guardian reported “a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist
sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their
own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future
is focused on cultural identity.” T he data was gathered before the
worsening of the eurozone debt crisis from September 2011. Were
these movements the counterpoint to Occupy, similarly poised to fill
the gaps emerging where mainstream political practice used to be?
As I write, up to 50,000 people are on the streets of Moscow
and around 50 other Russian cities, defying the cold and threat of
crackdown to protests against the prime minister Vladimir Putin,
amid allegations of election fraud.
George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, has just been
removed in favour of a new coalition government, after proposing a
referendum on new austerity measures and membership of the euro. In
his speech announcing the cancellation of the referendum, he said: “I
believe deeply in democracy.” T he referendum was considered by
Europe’s leaders to be too dangerous to be deployed.
A few days later, Italy — where Silvio Berlusconi, the country’s
longest serving prime minister, had finally been forced out (not by
voters but by the markets) — joined Greece in being led by unelected
“technocrats”, in something of an implicit snub to democracy itself.
— 8 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

“The sidelining of elected politicians in the continent that
exported democracy to the world was, in its way, as
momentous a development as this week’s debt market
turmoil.” (Financial Times, 12 November 2011)
As the journalist Gillian Tett admitted: “T he situation calls for
very firm, forward-looking action that is almost impossible in a
rowdy democratic political system at the moment.” (T he Guardian,
11 November 2011)
When this sorry scene, too rowdy for democracy, is viewed in
comparison with the last decade’s rapid economic growth in emerging
economies, often with very different cultures of decision-making, the
sense of despair is somehow sharper.
CRISIS
Common to all of these stories — from violent, sometimes randomly
directed explosions of civil unrest to carefully targeted peaceful
protest — is this lack of faith in core systems. T he systems in
question could not be more fundamental, encompassing the economic
foundations of western development to the particular structures of
governance and representation in all of the countries concerned, and
essentially democracy itself.
At its most visceral, we see this lack of faith manifested in
violence, and strikingly similar footage has been shot on the streets
of London, Athens, Cairo and New York. We must be careful to pick
apart the different drivers of each, yet we can also understand them
all as distrust, disbelief and dismay with existing systems.
In Athens, smoke from burning cars and litter bins mixes with
billowing shrouds of tear gas because of another austerity bill being
awkwardly manoeuvred through the Greek parliament. T he riots
across England were triggered by the shooting of Mark Duggan in
— 9 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Tottenham, north London, by the police, and exacerbated by similar
austerity measures to those in Greece. With the Arab Spring, the
drivers concern fundamental political models rather than economic
hardship as such, whereas the Occupy movement directly addresses
the core ideologies and practices underpinning a globalised economy.
Occupy is global in outlook, shifting positions subtly but still
expressing a lack of faith in a loosely defined “system”.
T hese protests, many of which are not violent, are not the
work of “a disconnected underclass”. T he BBC’s economics editor,
Paul Mason, in his blog post “Twenty Reasons Why it’s Kicking Off
Everywhere”, described a new sociological type — “the graduate with
no future” — later going on to describe the “economic permafrost”
(apparently a phrase coined internally at HSBC) underpinning Occupy
Everywhere.
T he International Labour Organisation’s report The World of
Work 2011 (based on Gallop World Poll Data 2011) finds significant
drops in “People reporting confidence in their national government,
2006 to 2010” in so-called advanced economies. Everywhere except
sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America saw a diminished confidence in
their national government with South Asia the most pronounced. T he
presence of Asian countries, as the new fulcrum of global economic
activity, indicates that it is not easy to make a straightforward link
between lack of confidence and poor economic performance.
— 10 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Equally, the report also finds significant increase in “Change in
risk of social unrest between 2006 and 2010” in advanced economies.
T his data emerges before the various examples of unrest described
above. Again, everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and Latin
America saw an increase in the likelihood of social unrest, although
the increase was greatest in the advanced economies.
Less dramatically perhaps, we can also see a lack of faith across
the various incarnations of parliamentary democracy with weak or coalition governments. At the time of writing, weak governments exist across much of the world, either in the form of shaky coalitions, small majorities or tenuous claims to power. In Europe, most states are in coalition. Other major coalition governments elsewhere include
— 11 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon,
Mali, New Zealand, Pakistan, T hailand and Zimbabwe. Moreover,
there are non-coalition governments in positions of relative weakness
in theoretically influential countries such as France, Australia, the
USA.
Across the various cultures represented above, decision-making
at the institutional level is proving particularly hard. T his, the
practice of politics itself, is being directly challenged.
Before October ’s emergency summit of all 27 European Union
nations to discuss solutions to the eurozone debt crisis, America and
China urged EU leaders to resolve the debt crisis and prevent the
world sliding into another slump.
T his “slump” seems a little beyond something that might be
resolved in a weekend. It’s worth bearing in mind the scale of the
initial bailout in the US alone — estimated at $4.6 trillion in 2009-
10:
“That number is bigger than the cost of the Marshall Plan, the
Louisiana Purchase, the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis, the
Korean war, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam
war and the total cost of Nasa including the moon landings,
all added together — repeat, added together (and yes, the old
figures are adjusted upwards for inflation).” (John Lanchester,
2010)
T hat impossible macro-economic scale, just as with the other
big-picture indicators such as riots and revolutions, may merely be
proxies for deeper fissures emerging in the fabric of society. All of the
examples above are from this year alone, yet their roots are in the
complex tangle of issues that have emerged in the last few decades. In
the face of all this, many of our existing cultures of decision-making
seem to be cracking under the strain.
— 12 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

REALLY, REALLY WICKED PROBLEMS
Essentially, strategic design, the focus of this essay, is focused on the
systemic redesign of cultures of decision-making at the individual and
institutional levels, and particularly as applied to what we can think
of as the primary problems of the 21st century — healthcare,
education, social services, the broader notion of the welfare state,
climate change, sustainability and resilience, steady state economic
development, fiscal policy, income equality and poverty, social
mobility and equality, immigration and diversity, democratic
representation and so on.
T he familiarity of this list does not mean that we know how to
deal with it. Each of these problems is a direct challenge to existing
methods, ideologies, practices and structures. T here are no clients for
these problems. Who is the client for climate change, except perhaps
the entire human race? Clients purport to exist for many of these
problems; sometimes too many clients, even, which is a different kind
of problem.
But a systems-oriented view of problems challenges the idea
that healthcare, say, is the responsibility of a Department of Health.
Health is directly affected by urban planning, transportation and
other infrastructure, patterns of employment, food, education,
industrial policy, retail policy and so on, most of which will sit outside
of the neatly defined boundaries of one department.
T he problems themselves are not neatly bounded or defined.
T hese are often known as “wicked problems’, after Horst Rittel and
Melvin Webber ’s 1973 paper “Dilemmas in a General T heory of
Planning”. Here, scientific bases for confronting such problems,
which for Rittel and Webber is social policy, are bound to fail.
“There seems to be a growing realization that a weak strut in
the professional’s support system lies at the juncture where
— 13 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

goal-formulation, problem-definition and equity issues meet.”
(Rittel and Webber, 1973)
If problem-definition was a problem then, it certainly is now.
Reading Rittel and Webber, it is sobering to reflect upon how little has
changed, or improved, despite them writing such a clear and
ultimately influential paper. T hese problems still need addressing in
new ways.
“It has become less apparent where problem centers lie, and
less apparent where and how we should intervene even if we do
happen to know what aims we seek … By now we are all
beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems
is that of defining problems … and of locating problems.”
(Rittel and Webber, ibid)
WHAT KIND OF FAILURE?
It has become a cliché to point out that we have increasingly
globalised economies, moving with increased scale and pace, and
powered by rapid technological development. T hat this is a cliché
doesn’t alter its veracity, however, and as a result problem systems are
now entwined in almost impossibly complex, interdependent ways.
Addressing core problems is beyond simple policy or process
improvement at a local level.
T he sociologist Saskia Sassen understands the Occupy
movements pitched in cities worldwide, or the protests in city squares
throughout the Arab Spring, as being knitted together with a new kind
of political fabric.
“The making of a globality constituted through very localized
issues, fought locally, often understood locally but which
recurred in all globalizing cities ... Today’s street struggles and
demonstrations have a similar capacity to transform specific
— 14 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

local grievances into a global political movement, no matter
the sharp differences in each of these societies. All these
struggles are about the profound social injustice in our
societies — whether in Egypt, Syria or the US and Spain.”
(Saskia Sassen, Domus, 2011)
T he eurozone debt crisis, just as with the American sub-prime
mortgage crisis, are talked about as local problems, albeit continent-
wide, when they are ruptures in a globalised economic system. T heir
failure is felt locally and globally.
“Just as we never consider the ground beneath our feet until
we trip, these glimpses into the complex webs of inter-
dependencies upon which modern life relies only come when
part of that web fails. When the failure is corrected, the drama
fades and all returns to normal. However, it is that normal
which is most extraordinary of all. Our daily lives are
dependent upon the coherence of thousands of direct
interactions, which are themselves dependent upon trillions
more interactions between things, businesses, institutions and
individuals across the world.” (David Korowicz, 2011)
Korowicz’s point about failure is well made, but it becomes
visceral when experienced locally. During the Brisbane floods of
January 2011, despite a week of warning floods in the Queensland
area, systems for food, power, transport, and some drinking water, all
failed. Supermarket shelves emptied of fresh food, batteries and
candles within hours. Local electricity substations succumbed to
floodwater almost instantly, with no real distribution of energy
generation at a local level (despite a climate that is near-perfect for
solar generation). Essentially no agricultural capacity existed locally,
and so communities reliant on food being trucked in every day were
instantly without supplies, and with the roads underwater, no clear
— 15 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

idea about when trucks might return. In the heavily sprawling
suburban city typical of a rich western country, movement was
instantly curtailed as the Brisbane river swallowed up key arteries.
Overnight, Brisbane residents within a wide radius of the flood
zone were left with only a handful of people to talk to face-to-face,
with no way of communicating electronically, no new food to eat, no
power and no way of moving around. System failure occurred due to
the lack of resilience built into systems of everyday life. T he gap
between policy and everyday life was suddenly very clear. T he
sociologist Richard Sennett might describe this as a brittle city.
But this is a modern city, built essentially within the last
century, of at least 1.5m people in one of the wealthiest countries in
the world. Of course that wealth is another manifestation of a
globalised economy — Brisbane was rich on resource profits made by
shipping minerals to China and other developing economies.
Yet the Queensland-based food security expert Shane Heaton
has described how western cities such as Brisbane are only ever a few
days away from disaster in terms of food stocks.
T here is a deep contradiction to such systems being so strong
that they can construct the modern world and yet so brittle that they
break within hours. T his can, in part, be conceived of as a design
problem.
It’s tempting to look at how some other interconnected systems
have been designed to deal with failure. For example, the Information
and Communications Technology (ICT ) concept of redundancy
essentially means over-scaling a system to enable back-up in the case
of failure ie having spare capacity on servers that are ready to boot
up at a moment’s notice. Yet a virtual enterprise, in which physical
matter comes into play only in scalable data-centre and sunk data
connections, is an easier system to make resilient than those
— 16 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

involving, say, logistics, energy transfer, water and so on. Matter
matters, in this respect.
It should be noted, however, that it is also possible to build
redundancy into physical systems. T he architect Adrian Lahoud’s
notion of “post-traumatic urbanism” is useful here, derived from
cities such as Beirut where the availability of infrastructure and state
of its fabric can change daily. T here, a form of”‘network redundancy”
exists through meeting everyday needs locally; everything — grocers,
hairdressers, bakers, tailors, builders — is replicated in each
neighbourhood, rather than centralised or aggregated into malls as a
so-called developed city might. It is a far more resilient system,
through reducing the risk associated with interdependency. Yet,
ironically, it is an approach to systems that has been “designed out”
of many contemporary cities. Sprawl is an outcome of active policy,
of design.
Interdependency is felt in a failure to deal with this physical
matter, rather than the wider context. As Korowicz also pointed out,
the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland led to “the
shut-down of three BMW production lines in Germany, the
cancellation of surgery in Dublin, job losses in Kenya, (and) air
passengers stranded worldwide.” T he cost of the Brisbane floods was
estimated to be at least AUD$10 billion, but distributed right across
the continent.
But again, after the drama fades, these modern systems of living
snap back to the same non-resilient state they exhibited pre-failure.
In Brisbane, there was little talk of genuinely reconstructing the city
with a more resilient distribution pattern in mind; instead, the perhaps
natural, if nostalgic, first instinct was to rebuild what was there before.
After the 2008 credit crunch crisis in the USA, the writer Kurt
Andersen saw a similar opportunity presented at the scale of America:
— 17 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

“I see the gobsmacking crash and resulting flux as a rare
limited-time-only opportunity to significantly update and
reform the system and the habits of mind that are its cause and
effect. Thus we now have a chance to remake our medical and
energy and educational and urban planning systems along
vastly more sensible lines.” (Kurt Andersen, 2009)
T hat didn’t happen either.
T here is good failure and bad failure. T he former is failure that
enables a system to learn, becoming more resilient, more adept. T he
latter is exhibited within a non-learning system. Are these non-
learning systems due to their fundamentally out-of-control
characteristics, systems whose complexity has grown beyond our
comprehension and capability? Or is it simply that policy is too
dislocated from its realisation?
T his clear separation of policy and delivery appears to be a
particular facet of government in many developed countries. T he UK
Cabinet Office has been undertaking a “T ransforming Civil Service”
programme throughout 2011, and is actively trying to close this gap
between policy and delivery. T he Institute for Government, a
Whitehall-based thinktank working with the Prime Minster ’s Strategy
Unit on the “change programme”, has published papers talking
instead of civil servants as “systems stewards” who work within a
network in order to enable delivery and craft policy. (Whether the
civil servants in question have the capacity and motivation to
become “systems stewards” remains to be seen.)
Our public services have been designed, operated and measured
to within an inch of their lives. Every possible eventuality within a
system, such as healthcare or education, say, will have been considered
and catered for, at least in theory.
— 18 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

And yet we see system failure all around us. For all its strengths
and successes, the UK’s National Health Service, said to be the third
largest organisation in the world, will not have been designed to
produce lengthy waiting times and overly full triage centres, yet that
is what we see. T he system has been designed in enormous detail,
from a policy perspective, and often works like a dream; and yet it
can also often produce appalling failure.
T he IFG’s report “Making Policy Better” consistently
highlights the gap left by “realistic policy ambitions” followed by no
specification of “how they will be achieved in practice”. T he authors
write that “the (policy) system as a whole leaves too much to chance,
personality and individual skill”. T his is what we see around us every
day.
Yet everything around us is also the result of a choice, a design
decision in effect. So when we see failure, we can only assume a
breakdown between policy, the intended design, and delivery, the
outcome.
Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at
the University of Toronto, has written recently on the folly of
separating strategy from execution in the context of the business
world, countering the prevailing wisdom of the previous decade or so
in management theory.
[1]
Yet the gap exists, and this means that failure is rarely learnt
from in any structured sense, as a way of garnering insight as to
necessary systemic change in order to build resilience.
But thanks to Occupy Everywhere and its ilk, there now seems
to be something else happening, some new level of tension and
conflict, a form of forced attention on to an ongoing problem of
complex interdependent systems failing, and the lack of faith that
runs alongside, beyond momentary crisis.
— 19 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

“When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from
Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street, it’s clear that something is
happening globally that needs defining. There are two unified
theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of
“The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of
“The Big Shift.” You decide.” (Thomas L Friedman, New York
Times)
But how to decide? We can’t possibly hope to uncover the right
solution, without first understanding what the problem actually is.
What is the question here?
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

WHAT IS THE QUESTION?
T RANSIT IONS
Tellingly, Friedman didn’t define how the Great Disruption or the Big
Shift might move in a positive direction. We need a sense of how
transitions might not be violent ruptures, or in some cases a sad,
inexorable demise. We need to find a new approach to complex
interdependent problems, given that our primary institutions are
increasingly ill-fitted to doing so.
We need in particular to find courses of action to address
climate change, healthcare, social services, education, fiscal policy
and local economic development within a globalised economy. We
need to find a way of moving forward without certainty, without
prescribed courses of actions or existing best practice.
We need to find a way of addressing and building on the many
positive aspects of recent protests while fixing or removing the core
system faults that they are predicated upon. We may need to redesign
many of our existing models of public-service provision, but without
throwing the baby out with the bathwater and recognising the folly in
inadvertently returning (“recovering”) to the ideologies that got us
into this mess in the first place.
We need to find productive ways of articulating questions in
order to better understand the nature of the problems we now face, in
terms of the architecture of the problem.
Having suggested why we need to do this, this essay will now
focus on a few examples of how some of these challenges are being
tentatively explored, through strategic design.
— 21 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

I work at Sitra’s Strategic Design Unit (SDU) in Finland.
[2]
Strategic design has a direction, over and above being a set of
tools, a vocabulary and a series of projects. Its focus is in enabling
systemic change through re-shaped cultures of public decision-making
at the individual and institutional levels, applied to the primary
problems of 21st-century governance.
T his essay will not attempt to produce precise boundaries
around the notion of strategic design, however, or describe a coherent
and complete set of tools, techniques and tactics. It recognises that
design is a messy business, despite the clean lines of its coffee table
monographs. By making legible its seams as strategic design emerges,
we hope to better understand it ourselves, as well as open it up for
constructive critique and progression through as many useful dialogues
as possible. T his essay is part of this process, testing out a new
language as much as anything. A vocabulary gives us a way of talking
about something, after all, and a more active discussion of
constructive possibilities may be what we need right now. Note that it
is not genuinely intended as a “playbook” to simply adopt, despite
the language, or a simple set of ideas and instructions to co-opt and
follow — legibility is simply intended to prompt thoughts and start
conversations.
In terms of extending this legibility further, other elements of
strategic design practice as conducted by Sitra’s SDU are outlined and
discussed on the Helsinki Design Lab (HDL) website at
helsinkidesignlab.org. In addition, SDU has published a book, In
Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change (2011), which focuses in
particular on the HDL Studio model, which is designed to rapidly
prototype vision in complex, interdependent problem areas by better
understanding the architecture of the problem.
— 22 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

T his vocabulary follows on from “the studio”, then, by starting
to concentrate on stewardship — the vital, messy reality of taking a
vision, transforming this into a strategy, and then making it happen
— in the context of public decision-making, as a new design
challenge.
But can the structures of the public sector and civic life, and the
content of the social contract, be seen as design challenges?
T his could clearly be critiqued as more than a little arrogant and
hubristic. What gives designers the right to approach such complex
areas, usually the domain of political scientists and civil servants?
Aren’t these essentially beyond the capacity and capability — if not
remit — of design? Culture is not something that can be designed,
after all; is it even ethical to consider that it could be?
However, a different conception of design — one not overly
focused on problem-solving, or pretending to embark towards a
resolution with a clear idea of the answer — could provide one way of
addressing this concern, following an idea of prototyping and
heuristics in a space of “unknown-unknowns” (after Donald
Rumsfeld).
T here may be something in the role of designer as outsider, too
— the naive position of not being a political scientist enables a
different perspective, which could have some value. Designers, often
used to working across different contexts from job-to-job, are used to
rapidly absorbing context and content, but also asking the unspoken
“obvious” questions to understand the architecture of the problem
from as many angles as possible. As Steven Johnson notes when
discussing research into innovation patterns in scientific research:
“Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few
preconceived ideas about what the ‘correct’ result was supposed to be,
— 23 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

allowed [outsiders] to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake
might actually be meaningful.”
It is of fundamental importance that strategic design gauges the
right mixture of ambition and humbleness at this point: ambition in
order to move into a space full of problems, inertia, legacy and
resistance, and yet underpinned by the notion that, as the industrial
designer Naoto Fukasawa has it, “design is a humble trade”, that this is
an area traditionally untouched by design, at least consciously, in
which designers have a lot to learn and a lot to prove. To be clear,
any successful strategy is likely to emerge from a multidisciplinary
perspective, in which design and designers play a part, no more.
Equally, however, we are motivated by the belief that the
current structures are themselves design decisions, no matter how
unconscious. And if it was designed in one way, it follows that it can
be designed in a different way. But it also seems clear that it would be
equally unethical, or at the very least irresponsible and negligent, to
stand on the sidelines while no coherent transition seems to be
emerging. T he idea of public service itself, for instance, which is
variously under attack, is too important to let wither on the vine
because of poor management, inappropriate metrics, or the demise of
one particular funding model.
DESIGN IS A PROBLEM T OO
But there is one further problem to solve — design itself.
Design has been too wasteful for too long. Not in the sense that
it has often been focused on producing unnecessary or harmful
commodities or addressing problems that didn’t need solving, though
these are also true, but design has been wasteful in terms of its core
proposition, its essential mode. Design has too often been deployed at
— 24 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

the low value end of the product spectrum, putting the lipstick on the
pig.
In doing this, design has failed to make the case for its core
value, which is addressing genuinely meaningful, genuinely knotty
problems by convincingly articulating and delivering alternative ways
of being. Rethinking the pig altogether, rather than worrying about
the shade of lipstick it’s wearing.
Design may possess these characteristics — at least these
capabilities are well within its grasp — but its orientation and
direction has too often been elsewhere, and rarely addressed towards
the more meaningful contexts described above.
Among design disciplines, architecture can work in this mode,
clearly.
“Sometimes an architectural work can make these processes
palpable, or like a delicate servo-mechanism guiding a much
larger machine, it can modulate the larger system’s output in
such a way as to make its dynamic apprehensible.” (Sanford
Kwinter, 2010)
T his notion of the designed artefact guiding a much larger
machine sounds like a crisp definition of strategic design, as we will
see. But, as Kwinter suggests, if only one or two buildings a generation
can perform this act, one wonders what the other buildings are doing.
“The course and consequences of the present world economic
crisis are unpredictable. In a few months, the vast balloon of
expectations built on false assumptions about the world’s
resources was pricked. On balance, despite the difficulties and
hardship that must result, we can be thankful that the crisis has
exploded prematurely, for political reasons, while the world
still commands enough time and resources to effect the far-
reaching changes that are required to bring our demands on
— 25 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

nature into harmony with nature’s ability to satisfy them. One
consequence must be that the practice of architecture will have
to undergo a transformation, requiring a return to first
principles and the release of the latent skills and energies that
are now being misused or frustrated.” (Malcolm MacEwan,
Crisis in Architecture, 1974)
Although this reads like something written yesterday, it was
written in 1974. While MacEwan is to be congratulated for being
ahead of his time, albeit in another world economic crisis,
architecture should bow its head given that so little has moved on.
MacEwan’s essay discusses the idle resource depletion and energy
inefficiency involved in construction, the need for social mobility and
income equality, the need for the profession to better understand the
sources of human happiness, the exploitation of land value by
property developers and the complicity with which architects bow to
that business model, an obsession with growth, a public
disenchantment with architecture and architects and a loss of
confidence within the profession, the problems of architectural
representation derived from photographs of buildings without people
in them. It is immensely sad that so little of this has developed in the
subsequent decades.
Architecture is not alone in this misdirection, of course. Partly
because of the design thinking commercial bandwagon of the last
decade, and partly because of some more meaningful interventions,
such as the Royal Society of Arts Design and Society programme
[3]
, the idea that design can play a wider role can almost be read as
an implicit critique that it has been cooling its heels for too long,
standing on the sidelines of core questions, rarely addressing more
fundamental structural problems.
— 26 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Yet most of these interventions, as good as they are, do not
suggest a repositioning of design at a deeper level within the
architecture of society; say, embedded within government as a
genuinely strategic capability.
Actually, design is usually deployed as problem-solving within a
defined space, as process-improvement within a bounded system, or
new product development within a market.
Design is usually applied to problems that are either, in
Rumsfeldian terms, known-knowns or known-unknowns. T he creative
city, the sustainable development, the usable interface, the clearer
taxation form, the appealing magazine layout, the energy efficient
building, the seductive car, the recyclable toothbrush — most of these
fall into those categories of knowns. T here are either well-known
technical solutions, and the real problem may be a lack of
commitment, funding, skill, or motivation, or they are at least clearly
defined problem spaces, that process improvement, nuanced analysis,
elbow grease and the odd bit of luck could easily solve. Design’s value
is often couched in terms of problem solving in these environments.
Yet although it can solve problems, design should be about much
more than this. Indeed, the problem-solving ability is perhaps the
least important aspect, coming as it does at the end of a potentially
more valuable exploratory process or approach.
Nor is problem solving unique to designers. As the designer Jack
Schulze, principal at the design consultancy BERG, has pointed out,
dentists solve problems too. Schulze prefers instead to think of design
as “cultural invention”, a phrase with a lot more leeway and agency.
It suggests a much wider remit in terms of uncovering, shaping and
conveying alternate trajectories.
T his is partly inflected through an understanding of
contemporary design in the context of the internet — “the internet
— 27 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

of things”, as well as “the internet of things that are not things as
such” — wherein cultural or symbolic value can be hosted in almost
anything.
Yet the idea predates the internet. Norman Potter presented a
wry classification of designers in his seminal What Is A Designer
(1969), which included the designer as “culture generator” (the others
are “impresarios”, “culture diffusers”, “assistants” and “parasites”).
Equally, designers seem to be exploring different business
models, including cultural production, rather than simply service
provision to clients. (BERG is a good example, actually, with a range
of products, services and platforms originated in-house, as well as
client-facing work.)
Yet too often, the stance of the designer is oriented almost
solely towards problem-solving. Too often, that’s what they’re
trained for. T he issue here is something rarely considered at school:
what do you do when you realise you are addressing the wrong
problem, your bounded remit having been the outcome of the wrong
question in the first place? T his happens frequently in design work in
practice, and yet stuck at the wrong end of the value-chain, simply
problem-solving, it is difficult to interrogate or alter the original
question. You simply have to solve within the brief you’ve been set;
you can’t challenge its premise. Just try harder.
As it turns out, you can’t solve that problem
[4]
. (It must be noted that much in the designer ’s unhelpful
positioning here is self-inflicted, through their own inability or lack of desire to address more meaningful aspects of the problem.)
Amid the “white heat of technology” phase of mid-1960s
Britain, and as a believer in the promise of many of the technologies that the British prime minister Harold Wilson was referring to, the
— 28 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

architect Cedric Price said: “Technology is the answer. But what is the
question?”
He was right to, well, ask the question.
T hus, design must make clear that its remit is expanded from
simply problem-solving to context-setting. T he limited impact of
focusing solely on the “lipstick on the pig end” of the “value chain”
— the product, the service, the artefact — must be expanded on by
addressing all aspects of this chain, and perhaps most importantly the
strategic context of the chain itself.
In other words, the question.
In 1964, the Swiss designer Karl Gerstner wrote “To describe the
problem is part of the solution.” A few years later, Norman Potter
reinforced why this is necessary simply from the point of view of
efficacy.
“When something goes wrong, it can usually be traced back to
the beginning, from the acceptance of false premises. Hence
on the one hand the importance of questions, and on the
other, of the resourcefulness of attitude that prompts them.”
(Norman Potter, 1969)
In terms of practice, design’s core value is in rapidly
synthesising disparate bodies of knowledge in order to articulate,
prototype and develop alternative trajectories.
But if these are simply deployed to apply lipstick to pigs, it’s a
waste of time. So much of architecture and design is wasteful.
Strategic design is also, then, an attempt to reorient design to the
more meaningful problems outlined in the introduction. A force
should have a direction and a magnitude, after all.
A DESIGN CHALLENGE
— 29 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

T his direction is towards the unknown-unknowns, the problems
suggested above, the problems lying somewhere behind these various
indicators of unease and unrest, the problems that existing approaches
cannot handle.
Sitra’s Marco Steinberg says we have ended up with18th-century
institutions, underpinned by philosophies and cultures of a similar
vintage, now facing 21st-century problems. T he distinguished
Canadian public servant Jocelyne Bourgon
[5]
pins the date considerably later, but reinforces the essence of the
statement:
“Many of our public institutions and public organizations were
born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They retain
some fundamental characteristics from that era … Preparing
government for the challenges of the 21st century requires
viewing the role of government through a different lens than
the one inherited from the industrial age.” (Jocelyne Bourgon,
2011)
T he primary institutions of academy, government, hospital,
corporation, and even our trade relations perhaps, in play across most
of the developed world at least, are post-Enlightenment and Industrial
Age formations and not designed to deal with these new problems of a
very different nature. T he social contract, defining an individual’s
relationship with government, was written for another time.
So if the traditional tools of governance, policy, and scientific
knowledge no longer work, what do we do? How do we know what to
do when it is not clear how to even discuss the problem? T his is not
something you can write a traditional brief for.
T he collapse of knowledge, of authority, of institution can leave
a dizzying sensation, a kind of vertiginous drop into an abyss of
uncertainty. We might suddenly empathise with, as the old adage goes,
— 30 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat. T hat isn’t
there.
Yet put yourself into that (admittedly unlikely) scenario and the
most likely course of action would be to improvise: to feel around in
the dark, while listening carefully. T his is what you do when you don’t
know, yet still have to take action.
T he sociologist Bruno Latour sees the lack of certainty and
“fact” in political representation as a clearer, and perhaps overdue,
recognition of how actually things are:
“We are asking from representation something it cannot
possibly give, namely representation without any re-
presentation, without any provisional assertions, without any
imperfect proof, without any opaque layers of translations,
transmissions, betrayals, without any complicated machinery
of assembly, delegation, proof, argumentation, negotiation,
and conclusion.” (Latour and Weibel, 2005)
Some of this “machinery” feels like the language of design: of
contingency and compromise, of hunch and sketch
[6]
. T his is an heuristic, an improvisation, a prototype from which
one learns a course of action, rather than having a preconceived idea of a solution. It recognises, perhaps, that the strategic act is in knowing how to capitalise on the sketch, to explore through prototyping.
But this more exploratory mode is also a different kind of
design. Much existing design practice falls neatly within an analytical context of problem-solving, broadly speaking, yet the idea that policy and governance can be convincing through mere presentation of fact supported by clear analysis is also being directly challenged. In-depth analytical approaches can no longer stretch across these
— 31 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

interconnected and bound-less problems, where synthesis is perhaps
more relevant than analysis.
“The problem is that transparent, unmediated, undisputable
facts have recently become rarer and rarer. To provide
complete undisputable proof has become a rather messy,
pesky, risky business.“ (Latour and Weibel, 2005)
Design produces proof, yet as “cultural invention” it is also
comfortable with ambiguity, subjectivity and the qualitative as much
as the quantitative. Design is also oriented towards a course of action
— it researches and produces systems that can learn from failure, but
always with intent. In strategic design, synthesis suggests resolving
into a course of action, whereas analysis suggests a presentation of
data. Analysis tells you how things are, at least in theory, whereas
synthesis suggests how things could be.
Our systems of governance still lend more weight to analysis
than more qualitative synthesis. Yet the more we learn about the
science of the brain, the less appropriate this seems. In The Social
Animal (2011), David Brooks suggests the persistent failure of policy-
making is because of this preference for rational analysis and
simplistic quantitative metrics, despite the evidence that “we are not
primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily
the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness”.
“The failures have been marked by a single feature: Reliance
on an overly simplistic view of human nature. Many of these
policies were based on the shallow social-science model of
human behavior. Many of the policies were proposed by wonks
who are comfortable only with traits and correlations that can
be measured and quantified. They were passed through
legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about
the deep wellsprings of human action as they are of speaking
— 32 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

in ancient Aramaic. They were executed by officials that have
only the most superficial grasp of what is immovable and bent
about human beings. So of course they failed. And they will
continue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true
makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public
policy.” (David Brooks, 2011)
(It’s an intriguing thought to stop and consider how we might
better create our cultures of decision-making that take into account
the emerging findings of neuroscientists about how humans preference
short-term decision-making. Given our need to make long-term
decisions — around climate change, healthcare, demographics —
should we design systems that deliberately mitigate against, and
compensate for, how we are wired for short-termism?)
T ristram Carfrae, one of the key leaders at the global
multidisciplinary design and engineering firm Arup, has suggested the
firm’s greatest challenge lies in the shift from analysis to synthesis,
recognising how different this mindset is for the traditionally trained
engineer. Synthesis is quite different to the apparently objective
approach of the analyst or engineer, or that of management
consultant; again, not least as it requires judgement in order to decide
what to do, as synthesis produces.
“To an ability for sorting, ordering, and relating information
he must bring qualities of judgement and discrimination as
well as a lively imagination. There is a diffuse sense in which
the seemingly ‘objective’ procedures of problem analysis are in
practice discretionary, embedded as they are in a whole matrix
of professional judgement in which relevant decisions are
conceived.” (Norman Potter, 1969)
While other consultant practices have other attributes, this
ability to produce, to do, as a way of generating insight, of enacting
— 33 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

and reorienting strategic intent, is a key differentiator to design in
this context.
“Through the action of designing we come to know the world
in ways that we did not know it prior to designing. What is
critical in design research is that the observing is intrinsically
tied to designing. Without the designing happening there can
be no meaningful observation.” (Richard Blythe)
T his emphasis may be cautiously welcomed in itself, given the
near-paralysis involved in decision-making described earlier. Indeed,
reactions to the Helsinki Design Lab Studio Model from policymakers
have been extremely positive, noting in particular the shift in the
tone of conversations.
So we have new kinds of problems, but potentially new kinds of
design to address them. How might we begin to understand the value
of strategic design? What kind of techniques, approaches and
structures might get traction with these new design challenges?
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

WHAT IS THE MATTER? WHAT IS THE
META?
CASE #1: T HE EDGE — FROM MAT T ER T O META AND BACK
Strategic design attempts to draw a wider net around an area of
activity or a problem, encompassing the questions and the solutions
and all points in between; design involves moving freely within this
space, testing its boundaries in order to deliver definition of, and
insight into, the question as much as the solution, the context as
much as the artefact, service or product.
Call the context “the meta” and call the artefact “the matter”.
Strategic design work swings from the meta to the matter and back
again, oscillating between these two states in order to recalibrate each
in response to the other.
“A case study: project work at the State Library of Queensland
in Brisbane. Initially, Arup pitched a ‘post-occupancy evaluation’ of
the library’s popular wi-fi service. T his ultimately involved several
days on-site, observing, interviewing, filming and photographing, as
well as building 3D models of wi-fi signal strength in order to
understand its relationship to physical space. T his largely matter-
based work then progressed to meta-based work over the course of
three years, ultimately becoming embroiled in the strategic direction
of the library itself.”
T he wi-fi service was extraordinarily popular; it was effectively
in-use 23 hours out of 24 every day, thanks to the largely open
ground floor designed by Donovan Hill architects and Brisbane’s sub-
tropical climate. Visitor numbers had rocketed since the renovation,
— 35 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

and the research indicated that wi-fi was responsible for a large part of
this increase. T he wi-fi had transformed the use of public space in and
around the library, and was transforming the function and character of
the library itself.
In documenting this ethnography-lite, and in conversation with
the client, it became clear that the library needed a strategic context
in which to understand the wi-fi service. Despite its popularity, many
staff could not connect the service with the library’s existing strategy,
or indeed their preconceived ideas about what a library was, what it
was for.
So the work developed a strategic edge to accompany the
practical suggestions about outdoor power sockets, amenities for late-
night users, signage and visibility and so on. T his strategic side delved
into the function of libraries in the 21st century, as well as the
possibilities for this particular library on the south bank of the
Brisbane river, in terms of its immediate physical and organisational
context.
A key focus was on how the particular service — the wi-fi —
might scale across the city in terms of coverage, but also how the new
applications and functions that wireless networks enable could be
fruitfully incorporated into the idea of what a library was, and thus
reinforce the idea of libraries in the first place. In effect, this meant
building on the particulars of the existing wi-fi service to deliver wider
strategic change across a number of dimensions.
T his in turn led to further work, as the same client needed to
deliver a new “digital culture centre for young people” further along
the same riverbank. Involving a retrofit of an early-80s building by
the architect Robin Gibson, T he Edge project was essentially without
coherent strategy and yet was halfway through the architectural
— 36 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

design process, having selected the Brisbane architects m3 and several
sub-consultants.
So the project for T he Edge rapidly retrofitted a strategy for
the organisation and the building. T his included the vision for T he
Edge, expressed through a variety of strategic artefacts, as well as
work explaining what a “digital culture centre” might be — and indeed
what “young people” might be. It also included the ICT strategy, the
approaches to audio-visual equipment, the definition of various
productive spaces internally, including the naming of the various labs,
the design of the pods along the window, the web services and social
media activity, whether there was a coffee bar, what kind of coffee it
should serve, whether the staff should wear uniforms, the organisation
structure, job titles, artist-in-residence formats, interim brand
identities, the selection of magazines and other periodicals for the
informal library/kiosk space, the approach to sponsorship
opportunities, the design of modular furniture systems, wayfinding
options, operational criteria for media façades and so on.
Along with my colleagues Marcus Westbury and Seb Chan, we
called this compendium of minutiae and overview the “operating
system” for the building. T he use of such terminology implied a
construct for moving backwards and forwards seamlessly between the
detail of a particular instruction and the operational framework
within which it sits, between data and metadata, almost. T his work
was zooming from matter to meta and back again constantly. It
meant being close to the detail of the architecture and engineering —
discussing the strategy for a handrail, or curtain, or a slice through
concrete — as well as designing the context within which the building
sits: the organisation and its intentions, operations, its business
model. Without rigorous definition of exactly the right artefacts,
products and services, couched in exactly the right way, the project
— 37 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

would have failed in a core objective: to appeal to young people on
their own terms; to be “authentic” and compelling in a way that a
government usually isn’t. But the same rigour was used to shape the
organisation.
At this point, it becomes clear that the meta — the
organisational vision and strategy — is being richly informed by the
detail of work conducted at the matter level.
Finally, almost a year after the successful opening of T he Edge,
this same client required a foresight-oriented piece of work describing
the likely challenges and opportunities facing public libraries over the
next decade. T his was pure meta-work, in essence, disconnected from
any particular building project. Yet the detailed insight gathered from
the previous projects informed the sense of possibility for the
organisation — what would the client countenance? What could this
particular organisational culture handle?
Equally, the contextual research conducted for the matter-based
work had located networks, resources and case studies that would
inform the foresight project, and help extrapolate accurately and
imaginatively from what the current library was capable of doing. It
would define possible trajectories that would stretch the client, but
with a realistic and manageable sense of ambition drawn from being
able to locate their interests and capacities relatively accurately.
Without the rigour and robustness required to deliver a building
— T he Edge — the foresight and strategy work would have been light
at best. Without the wider insight garnered from strategic vision work,
and access to the clients and stakeholders at that level, the details of
the building project and architecture would not have been as well-
tuned.
With this project, as with any project that tries to break a
mould, it’s clear that the context had to be designed, as well as the
— 38 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

built outcome. Here, the context means a new organisation (T he
Edge), the existing host organisation (the State Library) and stopping
off at almost every node in the network of relationships emerging
from the project.
T his basic idea, zooming back and forth from matter to meta,
and using each scale to refine the other, is core to strategic design.
T here are several emerging ideas — again, a vocabulary as much as
anything — that we can use to organise our approaches to this idea.
T hey are described as “plays”, as in a football playbook, to suggest
they might be adopted and altered, and deployed elsewhere.
PLAY #1: T HE MACGUFFIN
With this idea of designing the context as well as the artefact, in a
form of strategic symbiosis, what kind of outcomes might actually
emerge, and how might they be organised?
Our core case study here is the Low2No mixed-use development
in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki (the name comes from moving from “low
carbon to no carbon”) and one of our core tactics is the MacGuffin.
T he MacGuffin comes with a particular provenance. T he phrase
is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, and has become associated with him
ever since. T he dictionary defines it as “an object, event, or character
in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion
despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.”
And in Hitchcock’s words:
“A MacGuffin you see in most films about spies. It’s the thing
that the spies are after. In the days of Rudyard Kipling, it would be the
plans of the fort on the Khyber Pass. It would be the plans of an
airplane engine, and the plans of an atom bomb, anything you like.
It’s always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry
— 39 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

about but the audience don’t care… It is the mechanical element that
usually crops up in any story.”
According to the British Film Institute’s Mark Duguid, the
MacGuffin, is “the engine that sets the story in motion”. In
Notorious, it’s uranium ore hidden in wine bottles. In North by
Northwest, it’s the entirely vague “government secrets”. T here is a
long history to the idea of the plot element that kick-starts and
drives the narrative but is somewhat inconsequential in the end. More
obviously, the golden fleece is what drove Jason and his Argonauts
through multiple narrative scenarios in Greek mythology. More
recently, the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a good
example.
Low2No uses the MacGuffin of a low-carbon building project. It
is a mixed-use city block comprising around 150 apartments and
commercial space, such as office space, incubator spaces for start-ups,
food and other retail spaces, connected through shared public spaces
and services. While at face value, Low2No looks like a modern block
project, it actually carries with it a host of innovations, which are not
immediately obvious.
For example, Low2No is designed to be a largely wooden
building, of some scale (around 11-12 storeys in places). T his is partly
as timber is such a strong contender for a low-carbon building
material, given the way it “locks up”, or sequesters, carbon, as
compared with the more carbon-intensive concrete and steel.
T his is now possible because of the existence of cross-laminate
timber as a building technology, which is fire-safe and structurally
sound. And this is preferable as Finland has a vast and mature forestry
and timber industry, which is nonetheless threatened by cheaper,
faster timber production from developing economies nearer the
equator.
— 40 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

If it can compensate for this potential loss of paper and pulp
processing, its traditional business, via timber as construction
material, the Finnish forestry industry has a new trajectory to
explore.
In order to enable the use of timber in the building, the project
had to change the fire codes within Helsinki. T hese were a legacy
from the 19th century, when timber buildings burnt with regularity,
and hadn’t been updated in this respect since.
Again, the building project acts as a MacGuffin, in that it drives
the plot with enough momentum to ensure that fire codes are actually
changed; it provided enough of a gravitational pull of importance that
it gave the relevant actors the motivation to reach into the policy
apparatus and alter the codes.
So timber is a building material, but also a strategic outcome. In
itself, at Jätkäsaari, it is literally a design detail, a construction choice,
but with these external outcomes in mind, this detail is connected to
strategic impact well beyond the physical reality of the particular
building.
When viewed in these wider strategic contexts, the entire
building itself is a mere detail, a distraction almost, which simply
carries the other projects, gives them a reason to exist, lends an
excuse to develop them — and the ordeals of a construction project
provide the necessary rigour to develop them well. It feels frivolous
to say that a building costing millions of euros is but a mere detail, but
in a sense it is.
Despite that, however, the artefact is also essential. In the case
of Low2No, the building is a platform for a wider series of strategies,
all of which are harnessed through the gravitational pull of the
building itself.
— 41 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

T hese strategies could not exist without the building. It’s easy to
get work as a consultant to pitch ideas — “Have you thought of doing
a timber building? T hat would be great!”; “How about doing some of
that smart city stuff? It looks like this, wouldn’t it be nice?”
T he idea is not enough. In fact, the idea is the easy bit. Yet
while it’s easy to put a PowerPoint together pointing out the virtues
of timber construction, it doesn’t actually make it happen. Without
the excuse of the building project, it’s unlikely the building codes
would have been rewritten in the near future.
And for timber in this case, read many other potential
innovations. For example, something similar has occurred with
“smart city” technologies and services, which companies such as
IBM, Cisco, General Electric and others have spent millions on
promoting, with little return so far. It’s not that it’s a bad idea; it’s
just there is not enough motivation to make it happen. It’s missing a
MacGuffin.
T he problem is in taking clear design intent — the stage where
“smart city” concepts are rife — into development, procurement and
commissioning, and emerging from the other side with the intent
intact, perhaps even improved by the process, such that further
strategic outcomes can be realised.
T he MacGuffin helps drive this process through its gravitational
pull, through its requirement for rigour. It gets the ideas out of
PowerPoint and into the “meta” of context, into redesigning the
organisational, policy or regulatory environment in order to get
things done. Legislation and policy is the “code” that enables
replication elsewhere.
When the conversation is abstract, as it often is in strategic
work or the realm of “good ideas”, it is difficult to resolve. By
building something we pull conversation towards consensus. We have
— 42 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

to agree in order to build; the physical reality of something pulls
discourse into a more meaningful, more tangible territory. So the
motivation provided by the MacGuffin in question can be allied to
realising strategies with rigour, in detail.
T here is a clear tension with this approach to strategic design
work; without the proxy of the building project, these wider strategies
would not pull focus or resonate, and often end up as the policy
equivalent of vapourware. T hey remain abstract, and easy to ignore.
Yet the project can pull focus so much, it is sometimes difficult
to keep the wider strategic outcomes on the table. Construction, for
example, has a habit of dissolving innovation on sight, so while the
focus pull of the physical matter is important and useful, it can also
quickly eradicate strategic aspects or innovation agenda. Low2No has,
on occasion, suffered in this respect.
Lose track of a building project by focusing on the strategic
layer too much, and nothing gets realised. Focus pull on the building
layer and all you have is that: a building, with no strategic impact. So
the MacGuffin is to be chosen and handled carefully. T his is the
practice of design stewardship.
To extend the metaphor of a MacGuffin, the audience (eg the
users of Low2No) are unlikely to care about the building project as
such; whereas the characters (the clients, the designers, the planners)
are focused on it to the exclusion of almost everything else.
T he building’s residents, visitors, workers, shoppers, etc are
rarely interested in a building’s intrinsic architectural or engineering
qualities. T hey are interested in what it can do for them, what new
patterns of living and working supports and enables. T hey are rarely
interested in the details of timber as building material, which is a key
focal point of the construction phase, but may well be interested to
— 43 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

know that a primary Finnish industry may have a new trajectory that
continues to enable wealth creation.
And yet the MacGuffin as building is also useful as it gives
audience something they can easily understand, something that they
can grasp on to, even if the idea of building is then expanded a little.
Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and The
Talented Mr Ripley, noted that an audience’s credulousness and
goodwill can be stretched quite a bit in this way, though not
indefinitely.
Equally, a wider audience might be influenced by the possibilities
within Low2No. T hese elements are transferable in a way that the
physical experience of Low2No as building can only occur on a few
hundred metres square of currently windswept Jätkäsaari.
So this influence on audience is well beyond the influence of the
building as architecture, which can only really meaningfully exist
within the world of architectural practice and architectural criticism.
So from the point of view of the wider Low2No project, and
compared with the replicable strategies that might ripple across
Finland, and beyond, the building is a mere detail. It is a classic
MacGuffin; not especially relevant in itself, but the entire plot cannot
exist without it. It is the reason for the entire story, and yet beside
the point. T he wider story is ultimately more interesting, more
affecting.
Each strategic design project might ask: what is the MacGuffin
here? What is the plot device that will drive the picture? What is the
artefact that will motivate the various actors to create a richly
rewarding experience for the audience, and enable strategic outcomes
by also addressing the context?
PLAY #2: T HE T ROJAN HORSE
— 44 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

A second variation on the idea of the strategic vehicle is the T rojan
Horse. T his aspect of the project also uses an artefact as the hook for
a series of other activities, though its role is in suggesting that an
artefact can contain multiple strategic elements.
T he MacGuffin is a simple artefact that provides motivation;
the T rojan Horse is an artefact that carries “hidden” strategic
elements.
So Low2No is a building, yes, but it contains
• a platform for exploring how to use procurement more
creatively
• how to rethink food culture in Finland in terms of food retail
and food production that emphasise local, organic and sustainable
approaches including urban agriculture
• how to provide new futures for the Finnish timber industry
• how to develop new ownership and tenancy models
• explore carbon accounting
• develop new forms of innovation environment
• build communal facilities such as shared sauna which reverse
trends towards privatised sauna,
• how to introduce the built environment industry to
participatory design processes,
• how to prototype informatics-led “smart city” behaviour
change amongst residents, workers and visitors,
• how to enable organisational change within the client
organisations, and so on.
• Each strategy is designed to be replicable elsewhere.
Although this particular language wasn’t used at the time,
Low2No was conceived with these principles in mind from the start.
T he project is about systemic change, first and foremost, with the
building as an enabler of such change, rather than the end in itself.
— 45 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

T his approach is evident even in the competition and procurement
process, which was designed to foreground replicable approaches and a
team capable of producing a diverse range of strategies, rather than a
particular proposal for a particular building. T he competition was not
about drawings, renderings, built outcomes — but about designing an
approach, a strategy.
T his is highly unusual in the world of architectural
competitions, which tend to favour the image of a physical proposal
over any deeper understandings of what a building can be, strategic or
not. T his is sometimes inadvertent, but is often a simple tactic to
generate capital — financial, cultural and political — through
imagery, and tacitly supported by an architectural media hungry for
the latest renders.
Low2No’s competition was instead designed to emphasise long-
term systemic change for Finland, particularly around the shift to a
low-carbon country. As Sitra’s Director of Strategic Design, Marco
Steinberg, said at the time: “We are not interested in your solution,
we are interested in the mindset you bring.”
Yet, again, this meant simultaneously working in two modes:
dealing with the strategic, while working on the particular. Steinberg
said of the competition framework:
“If we had done a standard architecture competition people
would have all known what the expectations were. We
struggled with how to keep a balance between developing a
big picture perspective and yet not disconnecting from the
architecture. We didn’t want abstract concepts.”
It is worth noting though that the winning team was led by
Arup, a global multidisciplinary design consultancy, leading a team
including architects (Sauerbruch Hutton from Germany), service
designers (Experientia from T urin), carbon financing experts and so
— 46 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

on. T his in itself was a reversal of traditional practice — usually
architects lead, with Arup as a sub-consultant — and emphasised the
need for a multidisciplinary approach that could produce multiple
strategies. As such, the team was able to design an approach that
matched the strategic ambition of the clients (Sitra, SRV and VVO)
and incorporate numerous strategies, such as those listed above.
(Disclaimer: I was a designer on the Arup team, before “jumping the
fence” to become a designer on the client side at Sitra.)
So the Low2No building is T rojan Horse, a carrier of multiple
strategic outcomes well outside of a traditional building. With the
emphasis on replicability
[7]
, each outcome is in effect a different platoon pouring out of
the T rojan Horse, and marching across Finland.
[8]
Every building has the potential to be a T rojan Horse — recall
architectural writer Sanford Kwinter ’s quote on buildings as “delicate
servo-mechanisms”, which he applied to the Pompidou Centre in
Paris. But most building projects, perhaps forced by the strictures of
the generally non-strategic construction business, are not T rojan
Horses. In fact, Kwinter sees 1977’s Pompidou as the last major
building project that genuinely reflected and actively changed wider
cultural patterns.
Facing the problems we do, it is no longer good for projects to
be one-offs. We must now take advantage of the T rojan Horse
potential implicit within each in order to strategically address our
wider culture. Here, the building project is a fulcrum for addressing a
wider culture of decision-making. As we’ll see, this is then a form of
“bait-and-switch” in which what looks at first like a simple “artefact”
project — like a building — is in fact a way of rethinking and
redistributing the Nordic Model of governance itself.
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

PLAY #3: T HE PLAT FORM
Strategic design projects such as Low2No are also conceived of as
platforms.
T he platform is perhaps one of the core ideas to have emerged
in the business world in the last decade. Instinctively almost, designing
services for the web has driven this thinking. It is increasingly
commonly understood that the success of Facebook, say, is in its
ability to provide a platform for people to do “whatever they want”
(of course, a simplification) to organise and run their lives, to
calibrate and project their identity in terms that are as intimate as
they like, to built third-party applications with the system via
“applications programming interfaces”.
And yet it’s the exact same codebase, the exact same offering,
shared by 800 million highly diverse users. It’s quite a trick.
Similarly the success of the iPod, and then iPhone, in terms of
media consumption is due to the wider platform in which it sits — the
iT unes, iT unes Music Store, App Store ecosystem. T his latter in
particular, in which users can make apps that sit within and upon
Apple’s platform, is key to its success. So Apple does not make the
majority of the content for its users — others make the music, the
movies, the apps — but by enabling and controlling the platform, it
enables and controls the value.
So the particular product or content by itself is not enough; the
wider context as a platform is what makes it sing, what makes it a
success. Karsten Schmidt, the designer behind PostSpectacular, a
London-based design agency, has suggested that contemporary design
practice, primarily embedded within the social, cultural and technical
relationships of the internet, means that we should “think of
everything as a platform.” T he platform’s core characteristics —
— 48 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

including, but not limited to, being scalable, replicable, malleable, and
user-centred — have proved to be extraordinarily successful so far.
Yet this platform thinking is not yet common outside of the
web.
Working on a metro project in Sydney, it seemed obvious to use
the same data around the real-time location and behaviour of metro
trains across three or four different devices (installation, multi-touch
interactive map, mobile app, etc). Yet this was relatively radical
thinking for a built environment project — particularly a public
infrastructure project — used to thinking about procuring services for
different spaces as discrete packages, independent of each other. T he
way data moves, as a medium in itself, could begin to change the way
we think about such services.
More importantly, it also suggests strategic improvements to
such environments. In articulating the idea of the “coherent user
experience” across multiple devices, one is quickly in a discussion
about a unified approach to service branding and delivery, oriented
around the user, across different modes of transit. T his, again, is very
different to the current situation, whereby these different modes of
transit are independent service contracts almost in competition with
each other. So the Sydney Buses “system” doesn’t talk to that of
Sydney Ferries, doesn’t talk to CityRail, doesn’t talk to Metro Light
Rail, and so on.”System” here is used to describe the business, the
organisation, and the resultant service experience, as well as the
technologies of infrastructure.
T his may have once made sense from an asset sales and
privatisation point of view, but it didn’t make sense for the user.
Where once this wouldn’t have mattered, this is now thrown into
sharp relief through the possibility of a platform approach to transit
— 49 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

data, influenced by similar platforms such as social media beginning to
run almost everything else.
Designing transit data on a smartphone leads to a total
reconceptualisation of Sydney’s public transport infrastructure.
Matter to meta, product to platform.
With Low2No, the block will be a platform for start-ups in the
incubator spaces, and through Sitra’s presence as a form of
innovation-driven venture capitalist within the same block.
It will be a platform for a new kind of food retail business, for
example. In a reversal of traditional property development practice,
in which a new building is constructed with a “To Let” sign on the
outside, and then absorbs whatever businesses the market can throw at
it, Low2No has started from the principle of “curating” particular
food retail businesses before the building is even designed. Experientia
and Sitra have led participative approaches, in which more organic,
sustainable and local food businesses have been approached to be
potential tenants in Low2No. T hrough this active curation, tied to
urban agriculture strategies that are designed into the built fabric,
Low2No becomes a platform for a new kind of food culture in the
city.
With “smart city” systems, the building produces and publishes
data about its performance in real-time, enabling others to build
visualisations, apps and other artefacts using that data. T his is
perhaps the most obvious sense of platform, but also draws additional
value to the block, over and above the typical building project.
T hese strategies are lifted from the context of web design and
introduces them to policy and planning contexts where such practice
is still rare, never mind common. T here are numerous characteristics
that define the successful “platform play” — this essay won’t dwell
— 50 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

on them, as they can be readily found elsewhere, perhaps most
usefully in Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (2010).
As T he Edge case study illustrates, the shift between matter and
meta, working on some traditional output of design practice yet with
strategic or systemic effects as a further goal, describes some of the
core characteristics of strategic design. Yet the design practice and
business strategy of the platform also has this zooming effect at its
core.
Here, the particular product or service has to be realised in detail
in order to derive network and platform effects once it achieves
critical mass. So Apple’s iT unes has to work in terms of some core
system functionality — managing files, playing media, payment and
account handling, and so on. Yet iT unes becomes a platform through
strategic licensing deals that enables the file management system to
become the primary store for digital content, and incorporation into
other hardware and software platforms that are part of a coherent,
almost seamless system of “content experience”.
At this point, such a service can enable a systemic change — by
2009, iT unes was responsible for over 25% of all music sales in the
US; in just a few years, it had removed a huge chunk of the physical
record store sector, which had been around for almost a century.
Note the symbiotic relationship, though: without the attention-
to-detail required in executing high-quality interaction design or
industrial design, for example, the strategic elements will not be
realised; without the strategic alliances opening up the platform, the
particular products and services will not be used enough.
Whether the designer is at the core of the business strategy or
not, one has to be intimately aware when designing of how a system
works on both scales and at all points in-between; to understand the
pixel and the platform.
— 51 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

It could be argued that the good architect likewise has to be
aware of the detailing on a door handle as well as a building’s
relationship with the wider system of built fabric, community and
infrastructure it sits within, whether that’s a log cabin on the edge of a
forest or an apartment block in a dense urban core. Similarly, a
particular breed of industrial designer is simultaneously aware of the
curve of an electric car ’s wheel arch and how it might suggest a new
infrastructure of charging points rather than filling stations.
Each of these suggests that a strategic element to design can be
entertained as a core part of design practice. Some aspects of design
have drawn this scaling between meta and matter out more than
others, and sometimes simply through the proclivities of a particular
designer or design firm.
T his feature is common to design processes and design-led
organisations, though not necessarily unique to designers or present in
all designers. Norman Foster reflected on working with Apple’s Steve
Jobs recently:
“He encouraged us to develop new ways of looking at design
to reflect his unique ability to weave backwards and forwards
between grand strategy and the minutiae of the tiniest of
internal fittings. For him no detail was small in its significance
and he would be simultaneously questioning the headlines of
our project together while he delved into its fine print.“
(Norman Foster, 2011)
With Low2No, the development of the “smart city” services
layer as a platform implies that similar code, similar interfaces — and
ideally interchangeable data — can be developed for other blocks at
Jätkäsaari, as well as at other urban renewal projects elsewhere in
Helsinki, such as Kalasatama and Arabianranta, and ultimately
combine to form a smart city platform for Helsinki and beyond. It’s
— 52 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

not only easy to imagine how a building-based service might replicate,
and gain in value as a result of a greater network, but it’s actually
imperative to build in replicability with a platform-based service for it
to succeed. As with the development of Twitter, it could be seen that
Low2No starts to materialise first as an applications programming
interface, rather than wood, glass and concrete.
Returning to the fire codes issue, a traditional approach would
have been for a new timber building, which would be an exception, to
warrant an associated exception being made in terms of building
regulations. Yet an exception does not enable systemic replicability; it
only enables one instance — the exception. So the strategy was to
change the general fire code permanently; that would enable other
buildings to follow after Low2No.
Even the architecture itself was designed to be replicable to
some degree.
T his is not common in building projects, as there is usually no
financial incentive contained within the business model to justify it.
T his is not a question of technology or architectural qualities, but of
business model and cultural attitudes. For Low2No to try to break this
mould was tough. As noted, the smart systems layer is far easier to
understand in terms of replicability, partly due to the relative lack of
“matter” involved ie a smart services layer. Building on
contemporary urban informatics thinking, smart services are
integrated into physical matter to some extent — in terms of
apartment fittings, lobby spaces and building façades — but the bulk
of it exists as digital media, and so is innately transferable. It is also a
medium in which platform-thinking is, if not inherent or mandatory,
well understood and at the core of most business models. By
positioning smart services at the core of Low2No however, we have a
— 53 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

chance to “infect” the built environment business with some of this
thinking.
T he challenge is to draw platform thinking into other areas of
public life, including built artefacts and physical services where
appropriate, in order to unleash its associated systemic effects outside
of digitally mediated environments or contexts. For example, what
would a platform for local, public cultures of decision-making look
like?
PLAY #4: T HE LAYER
T he additional benefits of prototyping, in the context of governance
or public-service culture, are that they provide a way of moving
forward in the first place, through activity that generates learning
(analysis) and human-centred system design as a side-effect of doing
something (synthesis). A prototype suggests a way of mitigating risk,
through iterative approaches, while delivering ambitious change — it
enables the platform and policy to develop structurally, finding a way
to move free of the straitjacket of over-analysis and over-
consultation.
But the strategic platform and policy cannot be a prototype in
toto, just as public service is too important to be a prototype. T here
is a danger in describing projects overall as prototypes, in that it
suggests they are in some way “not real”, that they can be turned off,
decommissioned. Strategic projects such as Low2No must be beyond
mere prototyping, or “showcases of sustainable living”. It must be a
real block, with real inhabitants living and working in it, as it is the
foundations upon which the subsequent or associated strategies sit.
Remove the foundations, and the whole strategic edifice might
crumble. More broadly, public administration was invented to provide
security, stability and certainty, after all.
— 54 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Jocelyne Bourgon, who has 40 years experience of Canadian
public service, effortlessly sums up this dilemma:
“How do we ensure that public institutions designed for
stability, predictability and compliance can also improve the
capacity to anticipate, innovate and introduce proactive
interventions in a timely way when the collective interest
demands it?” (Jocelyne Bourgon, 2011)
T hinking about what elements of a platform can be prototyped
can be informed by understanding layers — of a policy, of a
governance structure, of a prototype artefact — and the differing
pace of change at each. T his idea of adaptive layers is drawn from
Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn (1994). Ironically, this
book has had made little difference to architecture, where its anti-
modernist invective was aimed, albeit with highly variable accuracy,
but has been highly influential in internet-based platform thinking,
interaction design and software development.
Brand sees structures comprising different layers that shear
against each other at different paces, and sees an adaptive structure as
one that enables this “slippage” between differently paced systems,
such that a structure “learns” and improves over time.
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

“O therw ise slow sy stems block the flow of the quick ones, and the quick ones
tear up the slow ones w ith their constant change.” (Brand, 1994)
T his provides an insight into how to design platforms, with core
services moving slowly while faster layers enable experimentation and
learning through prototyping. How to apply this to governance and
cultures of decision-making? Brand moved his layers diagram beyond
buildings to culture, seeing governance as a layer within a global
— 56 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

system of shearing layers. “Shearing and slipping” in this context
describe a form of information exchange.
Similarly, Steven Johnson has written about the generative
platform’s reliance on the idea of stacked layers, or “platform
stacks”, in which cultural and scientific development, as well as the
internet, rely on a form of strata of informational exchanges
(Johnson, 2010).
— 57 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

But what if this entire system of fast and slow layers was
overlaid on to government? In Fast Strategy, Mikko Kosonen and
Yves Doz describe their notion of strategic agility in terms of
possessing “an ongoing capability for real-time strategic sensitivity,
quick collective commitments, and fast and strong resource
redeployment”.
Agility is a good word in this context, as opposed to say
“speed”. Government is often characterised as being too slow, but
speed should not be a driver in itself. It could be that we need a form
of slow government, predicated on a similar idea of slowness that
underpins the slow-food movement: valuing craft, provenance,
attention to detail, shared responsibility, while creating a platform for
dialogue and community through human-centredness. A fast, “push-
button democracy” might well be the last thing we need.
Equally, there are areas of public service where the language and
practice of prototyping and “fast layers” has to be developed with
care. When the sector is healthcare, or some other area of public
service where lives are at risk, it’s clear that the threshold for
experimentation has to be tighter, and the slow pace of change of
some layers can be an advantage. Although it happens, it should not
be the case that peoples’ lives can be put at risk through an approach
that preferences iteration — “it will get better” — over safeguards.
T his idea of fast and slow layers can then be used to frame the
discussion of risk within a system, with some layers slower and
careful, and others more agile, more exploratory. Seeing the layers as
linked — from policy to delivery, from system to product or service
— albeit slipping fluidly against each other — also suggests a platform
approach that intrinsically enables learning, and thus closes the policy
gap described earlier. User-centredness, another core value in
contemporary design, can be layered across this system too, with
— 58 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

exterior layers of the platform more participative than slower, more
strategic “internal” layers. T he faster layers can pivot with greater
flexibility, over time altering the slower layers conceptually beneath,
their intended plasticity dictating how much and how quickly their
“shape memory” can be rewritten. Again, this is zooming from
matter to meta and back again.
All this would usefully reorient “problems” with risk,
uncertainty and complexity through iterative development and wider
systems thinking. It requires a comfort with complexity and “out-of-
control systems” that is not exactly a natural fit with public-sector
culture at this point.
However, it is increasingly common in business. Arup’s T ristram
Carfrae has suggested the value of wallowing in complexity, of being
entirely absorbed within a problem space, feeling your way around
through exploration and projection, rather than trying to stand back
and objectively survey or predict a route through. T his has an
inadvertent echo of Potter ’s “advice for beginners” in his What is a
Designer:
“If you climb on top of a job, trying to master it, the work will
suffocate. Let it take you, play with it, search for its own life.”
(Norman Potter, 1969)
T his exploration is also evocative of current thinking at the
edge of business practice. Writing in the business magazine Forbes,
Haydn Shaughnessy describes General Electric’s $100 million
investment in cancer care through a social-innovation approach,
based on Michael Porter ’s notion of “shared value”. T he language is
peppered with “building ecosystems”, “shared platforms”, and
systems deliberately exploring a space that is ill-defined through “a
business process (that) appears vague when compared to traditional
$100 million investments”.
— 59 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

“What GE seem to be saying though is that you can’t really
control the ecosystem approach to business. As challenges
become more complex the appropriate strategy is one that
mixes new ingredients into the soup and then waits to see what
kind of flavours come out.”
Similarly, Steven Johnson relates how the potential of the
“generative platform” is enabled through creating “a space where
hunches and serendipitous collisions … and recycling can thrive. It is
possible to create such a space in a walled garden. But you are far
better off situating your platform in a commons.” (Johnson, 2010)
At first glance, looking at such “risky” language, one might
think that getting the public sector to this point would be quite a
challenge. But wait, the GE project concerns cancer care; a core
public good. T he challenge may be more in terms of leadership and
political capital than in practice. A platform approach intrinsically
entails this slightly out-of-control aspect, although the activity is
within a platform is fundamentally shaped by the foundations and
affordances it is designed with, and an understanding of which layers
can be fast and which must be slow.
However, political capital is predicated on stated guarantees, not
“waiting to see what kind of flavours come out”. As Philip Colligan
of Nesta has pointed out, President Obama was elected for “Yes we
can”, not “Yes we’ll try”. It would be more accurate to say “Yes we’ll
try”, or even “You know what? We’ll give it our best shot, try out a
few things, see what sticks, we’ll get a few things wrong but we’ll try
really hard and, the House of Representatives willing, we’ll get better
over time.”
Yet could genuine statements of intention, or long-term
investments, be disconnected from electoral campaigns and short-
— 60 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

term political cycles? T his is a design challenge too. All electoral
systems are designs, after all. Each is constantly being recalibrated.
For all the value they could create, too often designers appear
naive in the face of genuinely understanding cultures of decision-
making, of how an inability to generate political capital can
undermine their ability to deliver change. Yet if design can truly
create new cultures of decision-making that recognise the value in
prototyping and platforms, it would in turn indicate a core value of
strategic design to policy and practice in public service. Shared
language is key to this process of assimilation; could policy usefully
absorb the language of design and vice versa?
T hese words and concepts may offer some value: the MacGuffin
provides motivation that drives strategic outcomes; the T rojan Horse
contains the seeds of multiple strategic outcomes; the Platform
elements enable those strategic outcomes to be diffused elsewhere,
with prototyping of different layers ensuring its ongoing
development.
T his vocabulary is not new — it’s been borrowed and
appropriated from elsewhere. But being able to ask the question
“What’s the MacGuffin?” or “How will this work as a Platform?” or
“Where are the pivot points?”, for example, introduces into projects
and practice a strategic element, a magnetic pull on the concepts of
strategic replicability and systems thinking.
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

WHAT IS THE DARK MATTER?
DARK MAT T ER
As the Low2No fire-code story illustrates, the answer to unlocking a
new experience, product or service is sometimes buried deep within
the organisational culture or the policy environment.
T he difference between traditional design practice and strategic
design is that strategic design recognises that this “dark matter” is
part of the design challenge. T his is after the urban planner and
theorist Wouter Vanstiphout’s memorable phrase:
“If you really want to change the city, or want a real struggle,
a real fight, then it would require re-engaging with things like
public planning for example, or re-engaging with
government, or re-engaging with a large-scale
institutionalised developers. I think that’s where the real
struggles lie, that we re-engage with these structures and these
institutions, this horribly complex ‘dark matter’. That’s where
it becomes really interesting.” (Wouter Vanstiphout, interview
with Rory Hyde, 2010)
T his notion of dark matter suggests organisations, culture, and
the structural relationships that bind them together as a form of
material, almost. It gives a name to something otherwise amorphous,
nebulous yet fundamental.
Dark matter is a choice phrase. T he concept is drawn from
theoretical physics, wherein dark matter is believed to constitute
approximately 83% of the matter in the universe, yet it is virtually
undetectable. It neither emits nor scatters light, or other
— 62 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

electromagnetic radiation. It is believed to be fundamentally
important in the cosmos — we simply cannot be without it — and
yet there is essentially no direct evidence of its existence, and little
understanding of its nature.
83%.
T he only way that dark matter can be perceived is by
implication, through its effect on other things (essentially, its gravitational effects on more easily detectable matter).
— 63 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

With a product, service or artefact, the user is rarely aware of
the organisational context that produced it, yet the outcome is
directly affected by it. Dark matter is the substrate that produces. A
particular BMW car is an outcome of the company’s corporate
culture, the legislative frameworks it works within, the business
models it creates, the wider cultural habits it senses and shapes, the
trade relationships, logistics and supply networks that resource it, the
particular design philosophies that underpin its performance and
possibilities, the path dependencies in the history of northern Europe,
and so on.
T his is all dark matter; the car is the matter it produces.
T hus, the relationship between dark matter and more easily
detectable matter is a useful metaphor for the relationship between
organisations and culture and the systems they produce.
Strategic design often involves doing what the physicist Fritz
Zwicky started doing in 1934 — looking for the “missing mass”, the
material that must be inescapably there, that must be causing a
particular outcome. T his missing mass is the key to unlocking a better
solution, a solution that sticks at the initial contact point, and then
ripples out to produce systemic change.
T he dark matter of strategic designers is organisational culture,
policy environments, market mechanisms, legislation, finance models
and other incentives, governance structures, tradition and habits, local
culture and national identity, the habitats, situations and events that
decisions are produced within. T his may well be the core mass of the
architecture of society, and if we want to shift the way society
functions, a facility with dark matter must be part of the strategic
designer ’s toolkit.
[9]
Dark matter surrounds the various more easily perceptible
outcomes that we might produce — the observable physical matter of
— 64 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

a neighbourhood block, a street food cart, a mobile phone. It is what
enables these things to become systemic, to become normative. It is
the material that absorbs or rejects wider change.
T HE PROBLEM OF INSTALLAT IONS
Dark matter is what makes it difficult for installations to scale. T he
design world is full of prototypes, installations, one-offs. T he idea is
the easy bit. T here are so many ideas produced every day,
everywhere, that installations and prototypes are almost a necessary
pressure valve, a way of getting things out of one’s mind.
Yet such temporary interventions are often accompanied by
claims as to wider significance; that an installation, say, can suggest a
new way of doing, of living. Indeed it can, but it doesn’t actually
make it happen. If it’s too easy to get an idea accepted, you’re
probably doing it wrong. You’re probably not disturbing the dark
matter enough.
A genuine and concerted engagement with dark matter is what
would enable an intervention to become systemic, permanent,
influential. It is not enough to produce the prototype of an entirely
new paradigm for the motor car, say, without redesigning the
organisation that might design and produce them, the supply chains
that might enable their construction and maintenance, the various
traffic and planning regulations that must absorb a new vehicle, the
refuelling infrastructure, and so on.
Equally, attempts to reach into that dark matter and produce
change will not be as effective without an artefact that can
demonstrate the benefit of such change; that can motivate, in effect.
T he strategic designer has to work in both modes, recognising
that both are connected by an umbilical cord. T his is also akin to
John T hackara’s idea of the macroscope — as opposed to a
— 65 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

microscope — a notional device or strategy that enables one to see
an entire system, its composite dark matter perhaps, from the
perspective of the artefact, the particular instance of matter.
T hus, the strategic designer has to understand the characteristics
of dark matter just as designers might understand wood, steel, glass,
pixels and grids. For the strategic designer, the relationship between
the observable physical matter and the imperceptible dark matter is
indeed as symbiotic and essential as it may be to the cosmos.
Manipulating one both enables and affects the other.
We need to understand more about dark matter ’s particular
qualities, affordances, pinch points, pliability, how it performs under
stress, its elasticity, its history of use, its possibilities.
Recognising that dark matter is entirely dependent on context
— a particular place, time and culture — makes this more complex
than trying to understand steel, say, but no less important to the
future of cities and societies.
CASE #2: RENEW NEWCAST LE — DARK MAT T ER T O
UNLOCK PHYSICAL MAT T ER
Earlier we heard about how matter can unlock meta; in other words,
how the different ways in which a building or other physical artefact
(matter) can be deployed strategically in order to generate wider
systemic change (meta). T he zooming back and forth between matter
and meta is a fundamental mode for the strategic designer, who must
balance both conditions simultaneously.
So matter can unlock meta.
It is also the case that meta can unlock matter.
By 2008, the core of Newcastle, New South Wales, had
essentially emptied out — a familiar dispersal to the suburbs common
to virtually all Australian cities. Dozens of buildings — more than
— 66 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

150 — lay empty in the often elegant yet fading city centre. Two
years later, many of those exact same buildings were full of businesses
and other organisations, with at least 60 new projects and ventures
starting in at least 30 previously empty spaces. T hose same spaces
had undergone basic renovation and witnessed hundreds of events. In
Newcastle, entirely new communities are now engaged in
transforming how the city centre feels and functions.
T his had all happened with no change in physical infrastructure
— the matter — or essentially any funding whatsoever.
So what happened?
A Novocastrian-in-exile in Melbourne, Marcus Westbury, and a
group of friends and colleagues, unlocked the entire place through
understanding and manipulating the dark matter; through the
legislative infrastructure invisibly overlaid on to the city centre’s
leaseholds, which had been locking down the use of the spaces. What
became known as the “Renew Newcastle” team visited the buildings’
landlords in the centre, and pitched the notion that there were
individuals and organisations interested in moving in. But being
creative businesses, small firms, individual entrepreneurs, artists and
community groups, they just weren’t the kind of individuals that
could take out a costly long-term commercial lease on a space.
“We created new rules, new contracts, and convinced owners
to make spaces available for what was effectively barter — we
would find people to clean them, use them, and activate them
and they could have them back if and when they needed them.
We stepped outside the default legal framework in which most
property in Australia is managed and created a new one. We
used licenses not leases, we asked for access not tenancy and
exploited the loopholes those kinds of arrangements enabled.”
(Marcus Westbury, 2010)
— 67 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Drawing from the language of risk management, Westbury and
crew had convinced the landlords that Renew Newcastle could act as a
broker of potential tenants, managing the risk of taking on small
tenants by altering the duration of agreements. Every aspect was
entirely legal; it was a smart, simple reinterpretation of leasing that
turned the negative perception of short-term, transitional
engagements into a positive one. It meant the re-booted city could
act like a platform again.
Organisations started moving in, rolling up rusty shutters,
painting the old interiors, transforming old department stores into
small studios populated with second-hand furniture. Free wi-fi for the
area was provided by a local internet service provider, happy to
sponsor the initiative. Landlords started collecting rent. People began
to visit the centre of Newcastle again. Given the new local economy,
other adjacent spaces began to re-open, on a variety of more
permanent leases.
Newcastle had started to transform itself. By late-2010,
Newcastle featured in Lonely Planet’s Top 10 Cities to Visit in the
world, an extraordinary turnaround, with Renew Newcastle
recommended as a particular feature of the city. Not only had the city
started to change the stories it told about itself, but the stories that
others told too.
T his had all been achieved by the notional stroke of a pen
through some leasing arrangements. A tweak to the soft
infrastructure, the dark matter, surrounding the physical reality of
Newcastle had unlocked the latent possibilities in the city centre.
So matter can be unlocked by meta, by dark matter.
Better still, the “code” that underpins Renew Newcastle is now
being copy-and-pasted to other cities, and ultimately to a Renew
Australia project. It works as “a form of shareware”, in Westbury’s
— 68 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

words, akin to Creative Commons licensing for intellectual property.
“Renew” is now a platform for replicating this particular dark matter.
Pragmatically, the approach to manipulating this dark matter
was to hack it, essentially, rather than attempting to attain the
higher-order political power required to change policies, redirect
funding or alter laws. So dark matter can be addressed in a number of
different ways.
Westbury isn’t a designer, but his ability to perceive the
“architecture of the problem” in Newcastle is a perspective shared
with strategic design. His focus is on the city as software, and this is
drawn from some background in understanding the architecture of
software and operating systems — this in turn means that systems
thinking is an almost instinctive act. Given that Westbury and his
cohorts understand the subtlety inherent in contemporary software,
this turns out to be a productive view of both systems and cities, and
the form of software that binds them together.
“It is the software of the city — which is often intangible,
bewildering and complex — that defines their possibilities …
Yet as hard as the software of the city is to conceptualise the
consequences of changing it are very real. It is only the results
that give it away. They are as evident and visible as the process
that led to them is invisible.” (Marcus Westbury, 2010)
Westbury’s characterisation of the city’s software sounds an
awful lot like dark matter; only perceptible by its effects yet
fundamental. Westbury’s story further reinforces that dealing in the
dark matter is not exclusive to the strategic designer.
With strategic design in mind, however, systems thinking is a
core skillset, a core requirement, given the propensity for systemic
change. T hose designers most familiar with systems — architects,
urban designers, landscape designers, interaction designers, industrial
— 69 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

designers, service designers etc — are perhaps best equipped to think
strategically and systemically.
Indeed, there are some techniques for understanding systems
holistically, and “feeling” their boundaries and characteristics.
Norman Potter described how designers can think in terms of
understanding the boundaries of systems, and how they can then
“perform” the system. Potter recalled how his cello teacher suggested
how to “get the measure of a job, to get close to it, (you) project its
life to absurdity (in all directions: scale, function, material, etc) and
then pull back to some sense of boundary in what you propose to do”.
(Norman Potter, 1969)
Whether Westbury and colleagues projected Newcastle to
“absurdity” is a moot point, though they clearly looked at the
depressed, empty streets and imagined a thriving city centre once
again, when no one else could. T heir ability to perceive, and then
manipulate, the system is what enabled the transformative project,
the systemic change.
So dark matter unlocked the physical matter, transforming
exactly the same spaces and buildings through a leasing arrangement;
a stroke of pen on paperwork, notionally at least. For Westbury,
seeing the city as layers of hardware and software, his dark matter was
the operating system of regulations and commercial arrangements:
“In many respects, the software of the city is subtle. It is, at
least, partially the cultural context, its history and its
economic circumstances. Yet in most respects, the software of
the city is codified and hard-coded — height and noise
restrictions, planning processes, rules that enable certain
possibilities and disable others. They can be embedded in
commonlaw rights and privileges.” (Westbury, 2010)
— 70 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Renew Newcastle immersed itself in this world, in order to
understand the affordances — the handles, the sockets, the switches
— with which it could manipulate the city. In this particular project,
as with many of the most interesting projects, there was effectively
no client, no organisation. T here was no “inside”. So Renew
Newcastle had to become its own client, create its own context, in
order to understand a way in to the problem.
T his ability to attain in-depth understanding, as an insider, is
also the reason that the strategic positioning of design is crucial, and
is part of the inherent value in strategic design expertise being
embedded within organisations. While certain techniques can be used
to immerse oneself in a client’s context, “method designing” for
example, genuine immersion will always achieve richer results in
terms of understanding dark matter.
DESIGNING T HE CONT EXT OF T HE WORK
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger
context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an
environment, an environment in a city plan.” (Eliel Saarinen)
— 71 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

With strategic design, that next context is often a team, an
organisation or a culture, and so refers to a complex net of
relationships. It follows that it is necessary to design the context, this
net of relationships, by considering the thing it is intended to
produce. Again, it’s this symbiotic relationship between artefact and
system, between instance and strategy.
T he design planner and teacher Hugh Dubberly has suggested
that “seeing patterns, making connections, and understanding
relationships” are in fact the essence of design. Yet few designers
— 72 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

would see that their design challenge is to understand, and often
reorient, those relationships.
[10]
T his again explains why design so often fails to live up to its
promise. Designers, like clients, are themselves attracted to the shiny
end of projects, rather than delving into the dark matter and settling
in for the lengthy engagement with an organisation. Yet organisation,
context, bureaucracy, regulation and policy are absolutely crucial to
the success of a project. If reoriented in such a way as to enable the
intended outcomes, the intervention becomes a norm, the installation
becomes a genuine product or service. Without that reorientation, we
have failure, either of limited, restricted outcomes, or occasionally as
catastrophe.
“It’s only after the explosion that everyone realized the shuttle’s
complex technology should have been drawn with the Nasa
bureaucracy inside of it in which they too would have to fly.”
(Latour, 1996)
As Bruno Latour suggests, products have their attendant
bureaucracy embedded within them. It is this that enables them to
plummet or soar.
CASE #3: BBC IPLAYER — ST RAT EGIC REDESIGN OF
ORGANISAT IONAL DNA
With a more down-to-earth example, design work carried out on the
BBC iPlayer on-demand media system from 2003 to 2005 further
articulates this hybrid connection between the product and the
context that produces it. T he iPlayer does represent a form of
systemic change, albeit driven by a different purpose to most of the
subject matter of this essay in that it is a public service media player
rather than something that addresses so-called “wicked problems”.
— 73 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Yet iPlayer was a radical shift for the BBC, upsetting just about
every apple cart and destabilising most of the existing certainties
upon which the organisation had thrived for 80 years. Now, given its
huge success — by January 2011, 165 million programmes a month
were being downloaded via iPlayer in the UK; an average of six per
household — it is necessary to recall the internal resistance to many
different facets of the project. T his resistance was various and
complex, sometimes intransigence, sometimes inertia, sometimes
active: from the impact on production workflows to the challenge to
the license-fee funding model; from the perceived threat to live
broadcast, the centrality of channels, and authorship to a new
understanding of resilient distribution; from the way in which the
internet trampled over the geographical boundaries that had enabled
intellectual property rights deals to the challenge of introducing the
different craft practices necessary to produce a then-contemporary
“web 2.0” service.
It was clear that the DNA of the organisation itself would have
to be modified. Just as Google, say, might be optimised towards
producing code, the BBC was optimised towards producing radio and
television broadcasts. Getting the BBC optimised for delivering code
was akin to significantly altering the course of an ocean liner halfway
across an Atlantic crossing. With much of the crew close to open
mutiny. In a storm.
To continue the analogy, one could attempt to shunt and pull
the ship with a flotilla of tug boats until it stops resisting and is
knocked off course, but it’s far better to be in the ship’s bridge with
your hand on the tiller.
I was the design lead for a while, running large technical teams
of designers and coders that had delivered iPlayer ’s predecessor, and it
was necessary to understand the architecture of the problem, to
— 74 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

perceive the system around the eventual product, and to see that this
system was cultural, organisational, strategic and regulatory, just as it
was technical.
Key design moves included regarding client-side developers as
being on the same level as designers and software engineers, to help
engender the mutual respect that underpins successful
multidisciplinary project teams. T his included negotiating with unions
and spending many, many hours working with human resources
departments on job descriptions, as well as re-drawing “org charts”
and talking with team-members. Yet this relatively subtle shift —
nudging one internal discipline upwards two points on a pay scale —
was probably as important a “design move” as any bit of interaction
design or information architecture.
Similarly, creating a small research and development function
internally, and designing it to have half the resources it actually
needed to deliver prototypes — and so making it reliant on short-
term partnerships with others — meant that the organisation had a
way of spotting rapidly emerging opportunities, such as podcasting,
while ensuring that this particular kind of intelligence was slowly
transferred throughout the rest of the organisation. T his built on
earlier culture change at the design and editorial level, driving what
was then called “user-centred design” practice into the heart of new
media production.
Involvement in contemporaneous high-level strategic processes,
Creative Futures and BBC 2.0, ensured that the intelligence gathered
from delivering the project could inform the strategic context, and
vice versa. Envisaging the BBC in 2015 from 2005 could only be
done with authority by having a foot on the frontline. Ensuring the
project could anticipate subsequent strategic requirements (overseas
users, paid-content) could only be done with authority by having a
— 75 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

foot in the strategic camp. Again, this constant zoom from product
to strategy and back, via all points in-between (meta to matter).
Here, this particular instance of the iPlayer was a MacGuffin for
deeper shifts within the BBC.
Numerous other activities surrounded what would traditionally
be described as the core design work: liaison with production teams
responsible for content about data and metadata; working with
presenters to advise them on the way to discuss on-demand media and
timeshifting on-air; working with broadcast engineers to ensure that
streaming servers could replicate the resilience expected of BBC
services; working with existing approaches to BBC archives;
integration with teams responsible for BBC production equipment;
liaison with external rights bodies such as the Performing Rights
Society and the International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry as part of official BBC delegations (it was highly unusual for
a designer to be in these conversations, almost a tacit indication that
design could have a strategic agenda, or at least a role at a boardroom
table); various other strategy processes at different levels; numerous
instances and formats of internal “stakeholder” consultation …
And so on, for around three to four years.
T his was a form of design work conducted from deep inside an
organisation; sometimes instinctive, sometimes tactical, sometimes
strategic.
Again, this was actively constructing “the architecture of the
problem”, given that contemporary media works as a system,
ensuring that it included the organisational and cultural context. T his
was beyond editorial concerns, which was also radical (and a threat)
for many at the BBC, which was, and is, an editorially oriented
organisation. But it was the design of media systems and organisations
— 76 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

themselves that became the strategic act that would alter the greater
system.
You can’t design a transformative service without redesigning
the organisation, and this could only realistically be done from within
an organisation. If you asked the organisation to somehow produce a
map of the architecture of the problem, as above, it simply couldn’t.
You can only feel that from within it, by observing its effects on
things, as dark matter.
It’s not impossible to win over an organisation to a challenging
idea from outside. Many do this all the time, of course. T he architect
Elizabeth Diller, interviewed in Domus, describes vividly the
exhaustive and exhausting act of winning over all the stakeholders to
one of their design projects:
“The experience of Lincoln Center, with all its complexity,
made me realize that I was already speaking in many tongues.
The message is always the same but the emphasis is a bit
different depending on who the audience is. Its true that I did
a lecture that basically showed the same fifteen to twenty slides
of Lincoln Center six times in repetition and each time I
inflected the delivery of the description in a slightly different
way. The same content but different nuance — it’s kind of a
Rashomon lecture.” (Elizabeth Diller, Domus)
Good designers may well be particularly good at this. But the
same role from within is different. Imagine if, as suggested earlier,
organisations such as Lincoln Center possessed some architectural
capacity in-house, either actively shaping MacGuffins and T rojan
Horses, at all scales, or more convincingly coordinating external
design interventions. It would help bind a change in dark matter to
this building project; which otherwise is largely just that — a building
project.
— 77 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

To use a football analogy, this internal role is akin to being the
No 10, trequartista, or playmaker.
[11]
As the play is whirling around them, the No 10 has to be aware
of all the various movements and possibilities within a constantly
shifting system. He has to have a strategic intent, to carve out a
vision of a play several moves in advance. He is a midfielder, and so
at the centre of things, and yet an attacking midfielder, and so
concerned with progression, construction, with shaping the game’s
events.
“Think quickly, look for spaces. That’s what I do: look for
spaces. All day. I’m always looking. All day, all day. Here?
No. There? No. People who haven’t played don’t always realise
how hard that is. Space, space, space. It’s like being on the
PlayStation. I think ‘shit, the defender’s here, play it there’. I
see the space and pass. That’s what I do.” (Xavi Hernández,
Barcelona)
— 78 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

It’s almost instinctive, this sense of reaching into the very
matter of an organisation and rearranging it on the fly. It is
sometimes reactive, in response to a phone-call from the boss; it is
sometimes anticipatory (his team mate Dani Alves has said that Xavi
“plays in the future”). Either way, it requires an understanding of the
architecture of two systems — the problem, and the organisation —
and a sense of direction.
— 79 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

MALLEABILIT Y
Drawing from Hitchcock was no accident. It positions design as a
cultural act, rather than, say, engineering or management consultancy.
As stated earlier, design’s core value is in synthesising disparate views
and articulating alternative ways of being.
For “articulating alternative ways of being”, read design’s ability
to describe how the world is inherently mutable or malleable — how
everything is a decision, or the result of a decision — and to suggest
and describe alternatives.
Design suggests design, in this sense, as it implies that design has
led to this particular state, almost no matter what the scenario, and
that therefore another state can exist; we can redesign things, if we
see the world in this mutable way.
Jonathan Ive, the senior vice president of industrial design at
Apple, in Gary Hustwit’s documentary Objectified, has an almost
pained expression on his face when he tries to understand how, in
some instances, the world has come to be in material form.
“Why, why, why is it like that, and not like this?” (Jonathan
Ive, Objectified, 2009)
Imagine looking at the world through Ive’s hurting eyes. T he
essential mutability of the world may be a somewhat naive, or —
more charitably — optimistic, viewpoint. It could also be seen as
solipsistic, in that it privileges the viewpoint of the designer,
suggesting that the designer has perhaps the fundamental position in
reorienting the world, that all things are design challenges. In other
words, a hammer sees only nails.
Yet Ive’s querulous grimace is found not only among industrial
designers, architects and service designers, casting glances around a
world of objects they’re partly responsible for, but also increasingly in
the world of policy, strategy and culture, a world that is the focus of
— 80 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

strategic design. From a position outside the professional design
world, Philip Colligan of Nesta also sees policy issues in terms of
design challenges.
“It seems a bit obvious but the way that public services are
organised inevitably influences the outcomes they achieve.
Policymakers and managers are taking design decisions all
the time, too often without realising it.” (Philip Colligan,
2011)
We can even think of the ideologies in play at any one time as
being a result of, or a manifestation of, design decisions. T he
dominant market-oriented neoliberal hegemony across much of
western society, for instance, had to be actively inculcated. People
had to breathe life into it, with purpose. It is not a naturally occurring
state. It is thought of as a system, with certain characteristics,
attributes and affordances; something that can be calibrated, modelled,
modified.
T his was clear when one of its architects, Alan Greenspan, under
some pressure because his global financial system had become a global
financial crisis, described the market-oriented ideology in terms akin
to an inexplicably misfiring engine, or some inconvenient errors in a
block of code.
“Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or
permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
(Alan Greenspan, New York Times, 23 October 2008)
T he hegemonic characteristics of such systems mean that we
tend to ignore, or conveniently forget, that they have been designed;
they have been imagined, articulated, stewarded into position.
“Failure wasn’t so much the absence of attention to individual
details as it was an entire culture to do with the primacy of
business, of money, of deregulation, of putting the interests of
— 81 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

the financial sector first. This brought us to a point in which a
belief in the free market became a kind of secular religion. The
tenets of that religion are familiar … all debatable, contestable
positions — but in the Anglo-Saxon world we forgot to contest
them.” (John Lanchester, 2010)
T he same can be said of democracy, nation states, regional
authorities, many systems of living, for example — all are designed,
all are design challenges, all are “debatable, contestable positions”.
“Many of the troubling situations in our world are the result of
design decisions. Too many of them were bad design
decisions, it is true-but we are not the victims of blind chance
... We may not have meant to do so, and we may regret the
way things have turned out, but we designed our way into the
situations that face us today.” (John Thackara, 2005)
One can make a strong critique of this idea that everything can
be redesigned because it has been designed. It concerns the
understanding that human existence is actually beyond rational
understanding — beyond a single unified idea of consciousness,
effectively (Semir Zeki, 2003). T hus it is not actually designed, at
least in any sense that can be consciously redesigned. So design cannot
pursue some prescribed rational course of action towards a solution.
Additionally, some have argued that certain core systems are
achieving a level of complexity that is increasingly beyond our
comprehension. On the one hand, this is due to the characteristics of
self-organising systems such as the global economy, which David
Korowicz argues is beyond our ability to understand, design and
manage:
“Our global system emerges as a result of each person,
company and institution, with their common and distinctive
histories, playing their own part in their own niche, and
— 82 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

interacting together through biological, cultural and
structural channels. The self-organisation reminds us that
governments do not control their own economies. Nor does
civil society. The corporate or financial sectors do not control
the economies within which they operate. That they can
destroy the economy should not be taken as evidence that they
can control it.“ (David Korowicz, 2011)
Yet another way in which complexity is placing systems beyond
our comprehension, our agency, is through code. Kevin Slavin has
positioned the algorithms that underpin financial systems in
particular as a form of stealth technology, that can “move invisibly
through the earth”. T hese “black box” algorithms are so complex
that they are effectively beyond the comprehension of even the
programmers who coded the frameworks that produce them. Some
70% of all activity on Wall Street is involved in automated high-
frequency trading, algorithm-driven trades that are either trying to
hide (disperse) or locate (aggregate) larger movements of trade.
According to Slavin, the algorithms that drive, say, a Roomba vacuum
cleaner robot are essentially not of humanity.
“These are things that humans write, but can no longer read.”
(Kevin Slavin, 2011)
One response is, of course: really, what are we supposed to do?
Helplessness is not a happy place.
Another response to the critique is that design, at least as
discussed here, is more exploratory than “prescribed trajectories”. It
might instead use prototyping and feedback loops to flush out the
right questions in the first place, before embarking on tentative
processes that are iterative and adaptive in nature. T his subtly
undercuts the critique about “prescribed courses of action”. (T he
optimism inherent within design also allows us to build on T hackara’s
— 83 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

statement that “out of control” is an ideology, not a fact — that
these things are the outcome of policy, one way or another, and so
can be reshaped by different policy.)
T his is not an instrumental or engineering-led idea of design, in
which altering the infrastructure, or plumbing, underpinning the
current reality will at some point produce a different one. Instead,
this is an idea of design as directly involved in the creation of culture
(culture as a way of being, a pattern of living, after Raymond
Williams, rather than simply cultural production and consumption).
T his moves design well beyond simple problem solving, and
means that design does not always “know”. But with this more
investigative view of design, there are no claims to having a clearly
prescribed course of action with a straight line to the ideal solution.
Yet we can still see the world as malleable, fungible — and look for
affordances to work with — without the sense that design necessarily
knows all.
It also means that by making small moves within a system, we
may be able to shift the pattern at the macro-level, just as a single
bird within a flock does. T his is Kwinter ’s description of “a delicate
servo-mechanism guiding a much larger machine”. T he “much larger
machine” may not be malleable directly, or even capable of being
understood. Yet it can still be affected.
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH
DESIGN THINKING?
AN ASIDE
By now, the difference between this strategic design and design
thinking should be clear, but it is worth picking over the bones of the
latter a little, in order to shed further light on the former.
Unfortunately, design thinking has been little more than a
distraction, if not a dead end. Even self-proclaimed boosters such as
BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum have retracted their early, somewhat
hubristic claims about the value of design thinking.
In a piece on Frog Design’s blog — along with IDEO, Frog were
one of the agencies best-placed to capitalise on the hype around
design thinking — Frog’s vice president of creative Robert Fabricant
hammers the final nails into the coffin of design thinking:
“It is time to move on. Business never really got the message.
What businesses continue to care about is innovation. While
designers may think that innovation requires Design Thinking,
that was an idea that never really stuck in the executive suite.”
In October 2011, Rotman, one of the leading business
management and strategy publications, published an article by Liedtka
and Ogilvie describing how to absorb “design thinking” into your
organisation, your management practice. T his article is a good
example of its type, and from a publication with authority in this
field. T he article starts by noting how T im Brennan of Apple’s
Creative Services group describes his design process, which he
— 85 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

illustrates as a spaghetti-like tangle separating starting point from
finish.
After chiding Brennan for apparently “mock(ing) the idea that
a formal process could possibly exist” for designing, they move
straight into the design-thinking mantra: we can all be designers, if
you just follow this simple 10-step process.
“The approach we describe here is more akin to Dorothy’s ruby
slippers than to a magic wand; you’ve already got the power;
you just need to figure out how to use it.”
Eliding the work of Apple’s Creative Services group with
“figuring out how to use your power” is a little ambitious at best, and
woefully disingenuous at worst. Few would have the capacity to
sustain work at that pitch. T he more fundamental problem is a lack
of belief in anything that wouldn’t have a “formal process” the
authors might recognise. If it can’t be reduced to a 10-step process,
how could it possibly have value?
— 86 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

T hese 10-step processes, just like other artefacts of the design
thinking rhetoric, do not and cannot go into detail about exactly how
to practice approaches like divergent thinking or sketching. CEOs
don’t have time for such detail, of course; they rarely have time to
even think about where their firm should be going.
“Practice” is not idly named. “T hinking like a designer” —
leaving aside the question of whether there’s even a point to
everyone thinking like a designer — is something that takes years of,
well, practice. Of experience stretched taut across numerous contexts
and clients; of constant, near-obsessive engagement with the world
about you that would almost be exhausting where it not so enriching.
It is also bound up in “the designer ’s stance” (after Paul Dourish),
which is more a fundamental matter of perspective and positioning
than simply a set of habitual tropes to be tried on.
Design thinking, as described here, not only misrepresents the
value of professional design but misleads on the promise of everyday
design.
While a form of design is practised by everyone, everyday, to
some degree — whether vernacular design of products, services,
spaces, or the everyday design of immediate social, cultural or
physical conditions — the practice of professional design is
something else.
Just as most people can cook, we still go to restaurants to enjoy
the work of a professional chef. T here is more to the practice of chef
than being more liberal with the salt and butter than one would at
home. Equally, there is more to the experience of the restaurant —
the art of hosting, perhaps, as well as other experiential possibilities
— than simply creating a place to consume food and drink.
[12]
In line with the significant increase in quality and variety of
cooking at home for enjoyment, there has been a significant increase
— 87 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

in the range, diversity and quality of food experiences available via
restaurant, café, street food and other professional hospitality
environments. T here is a symbiotic relationship here, with the entire
food system benefiting from increased engagement in both aspects.
So perhaps there is an analogue between cook and chef, and
everyday design and professional design. Being aware of the value of
design, through an everyday engagement with it, will benefit
professional design and vice versa. T he increased awareness does not
then undermine the role for professional design, but could reinforce it.
T he message behind design thinking, however, doesn’t really
state this linked opportunity. Allied to the consultant model, that
would look too craven — i.e. if you open your eyes to design
thinking, you may also open your wallet to more fees for us
professional designers.
A tough sell.
Design thinking needn’t solely reside in the consultant model of
course, and there are benefits to more people being aware. But this
does not mean that an everyday cook working at home can achieve
the same results as a professional chef working in a professional
kitchen, hosted by a professional maître d’ in a professionally
designed space. Just as a pub football team on a Sunday league pitch
will struggle to attain the heights of Barcelona’s highly technical tiki-
taka style of football.
Strategic design, then, is the application of professionally
practiced design expertise to strategy, policy, governance and culture.
An outcome of its work may be heightened awareness of some easily
shareable attributes of design practice but the professional expertise
of the designer is a core ingredient in the mix.
Proponents of design thinking rarely suggest that design
practice might involve, say, sitting and drawing a shape or object
— 88 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

hundreds upon hundreds of times.
T hree members of Sitra’s SDU, architects all, have often
mentioned the hours and hours spent at the Harvard Graduate School
of Design in drawing classes. T his is not the glamorous end of design
practice; clients often only see what Chilean architect Alejandro
Aravena called the “magic moment”, when the designer quickly
produces a sketch in front of the awed client. Aravena points out that
this is really the tip of the iceberg, in terms of work; that the client is
not seeing the sheer graft spent leading up to that moment. It, in
part, is reinforced by design media that shows glossy pictures of
outcomes — the building, the product, the screenshot, one set of
plans.
T he architect Renzo Piano, quoted in Richard Sennett’s The
Craftsman, gives a sense of this graft:
“You start by sketching, then you do a drawing, then you
make a model, and then you go to reality — you go to the site
— and then you go back to drawing. You build up a kind of
circularity between drawing and making and then back again
… This is very typical of the craftsman’s approach. You think
and do at the same time. You draw and you make. Drawing …
is revisited. You do it, you redo it, and you redo it again.”
(Renzo Piano, 2008)
So the design-thinking set is being somewhat selective in hiding
the rest of the iceberg when suggesting their “Top five design skills
you can pick up”.
To be selective is not a problem; any transferable set of skills
still needs translating from one context to another, and some
approaches won’t survive the journey. However, in sloughing off the
apparently tough or repetitive aspects of design practice, the
— 89 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

proponents of design thinking are in danger of suggesting that there is
no relationship between these elements and the other aspects.
T hey are in fact tightly bound. T he ability to draw 100 variants
rapidly, accurately and imaginatively seems directly connected to
these “higher-order” outcomes of synthesis, visualisation, holistic
thinking and so on.
An example: West London. Mid-1990s. A recording studio. T he
musician Bryan Ferry is giving me some feedback on my proposed
designs for his website.
“More colour, more girls,” he said, with just the hint of a smile.
While this had the benefit of being a succinct — and, it turns
out, memorable — summary of the client’s requirements, it leaves the
designer with quite a lot to do, in terms of translating that into the
minutiae of information architecture, interaction design and so on.
But as a designer, one quickly gets used to rapidly translating one
short, oblique input into a series of possible outputs.
T he proponents of design thinking would recognise the value of
this, and suggest that it might be a core tenet, and one to be adopted
by non-designers everywhere.
Yet I suspect the ability to take “More colour, more girls” and
translate it into business strategy and interactive experience is
connected directly to the hard graft of late nights filling a
sketchbook, poring over reference material, producing variant after
variant in Photoshop et al, constantly “eating the world with your
eyes”, as the fictional design tutor in Chip Kidd’s novel The Cheese
Monkeys (2002) memorably put it. In short, the mental agility to
generate ideas — to see design as cultural invention — is directly
linked to the craft skills of design practice.
“More colour, more girls” is a glib example. But the hard work
in these lower order design processes — the trainee architect drawing
— 90 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

the same shape for hours until the essence of a line emerges —
demonstrate how craft skills inform the higher order design processes.
Our particular challenge is to apply them outside of the traditional
commercial context of products and services, and this is somewhere
that design thinking also falls curiously short.
IDEO’s T im Brown wrote one of the key initial books on design
thinking — Change By Design. He suggests the value in design being
applied strategically and in a rich variety of contexts; yet in a chapter
called “A new social contract”, IDEO’s frame tends towards examples
from business. T his is when the writing comes alive, when the case
studies resonate. T here tends to be little indication of how to actually
engage with, in particular, the “dark matter” of public service and
governance, which is essentially what social contracts are embedded
within.
When he does address public agencies — the T ransportation
Security Administration, the US Department of Energy — there is no
real analysis of the architecture of the problem, of the position of
those organisations in public and civic life, of the conditions of
public-service culture.
T here is no sense of whether, say, security and energy are being
well-addressed by the existence of those two organisations, and
whether the problem might be better framed in some other way. T he
clients exist, and as they are clients, their position remains
unchallenged, despite their positioning, remit, stance, framing,
governance, and political relationships being a potentially
fundamental component of the architecture of the problem. T his is
where design thinking falls short of anything remotely radical. It’s
where it is actually stuck in process improvement within a
predetermined problem space, unable to manouevre into more
interesting and useful areas.
— 91 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

So despite being a well-balanced book, essentially a good book, it
is too easily led into the arena of commercial management
consultancy practice rather than the conditions of social contracts.
T here is nothing wrong with that in itself of course, except
perhaps that it promises a discussion of a new social contract and
doesn’t necessarily deliver one, but it does leave a large space for a
different kind of strategic design addressing governance, public life,
the civic sector.
As it doesn’t address this dark matter, the architecture of the
problem, design thinking cannot genuinely get traction in any
fundamental sense. Design-thinking proponents might suggest that
getting “a designer in the boardroom” might be a good idea yet they
don’t indicate how one might do that, or really what they might do
when they get there.
— 92 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Victor Papanek’s diagram juxtaposes the share that the design
typically has of a problem space, at around 5%, with what he calls
“the real problem” consisting of the remaining 95% (Victor Papanek,
1984). Nearly four decades on, design thinking does not present any
particularly new insights for the 5% problem.
Design performs best at the start of things, even before the need
for a “start of things” has been clarified, but unfortunately, as Noah
Raford pointed out, “the everyday realpolitik of most organisations
will actively work against this from occurring”.
— 93 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Again, this calls for organisations to be redesigned to address
this. T he brilliant designer simply ends up wallowing luxuriantly in
that 5%, limiting their effect. T he incompetent or unlucky designer
ends up battered back into the 5%. In either case it’s an ineffective
position to work from, which cannot exert the strategic value
inherent in design.
You cannot ask the right question from the 5% corner in
Papanek’s diagram. T he design function need not be expanded, but
strategic design is predicated on a different position within the
organisation’s decision-making apparatus.
Strategic design must be embedded within the heart of the
organisation, in order to be able to perceive how the entire
organisation operates (this is a system) and move freely across the
intersection of its elements, and to have the agency to suggest and
enact a reorientation of the organisation.
At this point it is worth reflecting on the positioning of Sitra’s
Studio Model.
Sitra’s unique position — self-funded and independent, though
under the auspices of parliament, and so both at arm’s length from
government and embedded at the same time — means that initiatives
it creates could begin to get traction right away. T his is in stark
contrast to most workshop-led consultancy, which often pitches ideas
in from outside (despite, typically, the presence of “inside” in the
workshop too). T hese subsequently bounce off the host organisation’s
shields of indifference or institutional inertia as, beyond a certain
scale, an organisation’s first instinct is often to protect itself against
transformative ideas.
— 94 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

In particular, much strategic work for government clients in
particular suffers from a major flaw — the lack of a “hinge”
connecting the work to a clear pathway to projects. If the workshop
is free, as it often is in new problem areas where there is no clear
understanding of value, it’s particularly difficult, Here, the client is
barely a client at all in one of the more meaningful senses ie they
haven’t paid for it, they don’t have “skin in the game”.
— 95 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Equally, studios can usefully bring together multiple
stakeholders. Yet with complex interdependent problems requiring
holistic thinking and action, this can lead to no one body taking
responsibility, and so potential solutions fall through the cracks
between organisations or within one organisation’s architecture.
Again, education is no longer the sole responsibility of the
Department of Education.
— 96 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Finally, workshops or studios themselves tend to a particular
kind of focus, based on conversation and collaboration — yet they
rarely provide the depth of analysis to tightly define an issue such
that it can be developed into action. T his often requires subsequent
work, by which time the potential client has left the building and
achieved escape velocity, easily sidestepping momentum generated in
— 97 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

the workshop. T he workshop model, which is often the foot-in-the-
door for consultancies in this field, is intrinsically flawed.
T he HDL Studio Model is designed to address many of these
problems. Sitra has, to some extent, the capacity to reach into and
manipulate the very fabric of governance. It is just inside and just
outside government.
T his embedded nature of strategic design is a key differentiator
from the consultant’s model of design thinking, which is often unable
— 98 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

to produce the same effects often simply due to the consultancy
model; the consultant has no “skin in the game” either, in the long
run. T his is not to say that a consultant model cannot produce work
of value; just that it cannot produce much work of value in this
context. It is left once again struggling to grasp the lipstick, rather
than anything more meaningful, as Bruce Nussbaum later admitted:
“In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess
along with the process, and real innovation took place. In
most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in
consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the
process was low, very low.” (Bruce Nussbaum, 2011)
Leaving aside the paucity of much consultancy work — which is
often because of the action or inaction of the client, to be fair — and
in particular the hopeless world of much change management
consultancy, the core problem is in this positioning. It cannot
genuinely reach into the organisation with any power to genuinely re-
shape, and has no capacity for the long term.
It seems far more fruitful to look at the possibility of the
strategically embedded designer. T hroughout 2012, Sitra SDU is
running a programme of placing strategic designers in various
positions in Finland’s government — in municipal and national
government — as a direct test of the embedded approach.
Another good example is Copenhagen-based Mindlab, a design
agency set up within the Danish government. Mindlab is formally
more service design than strategic design, and so is concerned more
with improving the performance of services and operations within
the three ministries that fund it (Ministry of Business and Growth,
Ministry of Taxation, and Ministry of Employment). Hence it has,
up until now, been working in a more solution-oriented mode rather
than a strategic one as such ie its annual report in 2009/10 talks of a
— 99 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

mission to “develop and implement higher-quality, higher-impact
solutions that have fewer costs”. It is interested in moving into
strategic territory however, and are clearly high-performing, so this is
another interesting experiment to watch in terms of embedding design
capacity within government. As design becomes to be seen as
strategic capacity, the value in outsourcing it diminishes. What this
means for both government procurement and the external
consultancy market remains to be seen.
Changing the positioning of the designer is one avenue to
explore. T he potency of design is related directly to these
structural/organisational matters, after all, particularly in respect of
strategic design. T he consultancy model simply does not have the
necessary freedom to radically change the brief, to work the context,
to search for strategic solutions outside of its engagement.
Cedric Price told a story of prospective clients, a husband and
wife, coming round to dinner to discuss the new home they wanted
him to design. Price sat through the dinner, listening to the to-and-fro
between the couple with some discomfort, before pronouncing: “My
dears, the last thing you need is a house; you need a divorce.”
Whether Price got paid for this advice, beyond his dinner, is
another unknown. But his ability to suggest a solution other than a
building is, unfortunately, still radical for an architect. Most designers,
most consultants, simply cannot act like this.
Looking at architecture’s perennial inability to find more
flexible and productive business models is another story. But one
simple way to take the business model problem off the table is to be
embedded within an organisation. T here is a strong tradition here, as
well as numerous examples of this in practice.
In industrial, interaction and service design, this is well
understood, with designers often embedded in organisations at the
— 100 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

highest levels. Perhaps this is most obvious in industrial design —
Jonathan Ive at Apple is the current high-profile example, but see
also his compatriots at car companies, consumer electronics and
mobile telecoms companies — but media organisations (old and new)
and other businesses where a user focus has been core to the success of
the business proposition, have also found it easy to make the case for
high-level, permanent design expertise in-house.
We might as well continue to look at Apple, given its popular
perception as the current high watermark of design-led innovation.
T here, design is not a stage that happens before engineering and
manufacturing (the analogy in policy-making would be the linear
stages of vision, crafting and delivery) as Steven Johnson has
illustrated when describing Apple’s approach of “concurrent or
parallel production”:
“All the groups — design, manufacturing, engineering, sales
— meet continuously throughout the product development
cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing
over the most pressing issues and generally keeping the
conversation open to a diverse group of participants. The
process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and
continuous meetings than traditional production cycles — and
far more dialogue between people versed in different
disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But
the results speak for themselves.” (Steven Johnson, 2010)
Indeed. T he ability to position design strategically will come
more naturally to these environments, given the long-term
engagement with the proposition inherently alien to the consultant
model; the consultant model simply cannot allow that kind of time. It
need not be alien to public administration and policy-making,
however; it too has a long-term engagement that could enable a richer
— 101 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

and more vibrant form of “production cycle”, just applied to policy
and delivery.
Strategic design is predicated on exactly this positioning: inside
not outside, long-term not short, the pig not the lipstick.
Within this space, design brings its own culture of understanding
(such that “inside” does not become blinkered), of projects (such that
“long-term” does not become stolid or oblivious to opportunity), of
stewardship and execution (such that “strategy” does not become
detached from delivery).
Design is unlikely to be outsourced to consultants when it is so
key to the success of the company’s products and services. Equally, a
reliance on an organisation’s staff picking up “design thinking” is not
good enough, compared with professional strategic design expertise
embedded within the organisation.
If we recall Roger Martin’s words about integrating strategy and
execution, it is clear that a strategy must be acted on quickly, and with
quality, in order to fully deliver. Having design expertise embedded at
a strategic level within the organisation would seem to be key here.
For example, Nokia had a similar touchscreen technology to Apple at
the same time that Apple was developing its iPhone
[13]
, yet Apple lines up its design capacity alongside all others, at
the strategic end of projects; it moved more quickly, and delivered
with greater quality.
It is not enough to just have the idea. Strategy must be
connected to delivery, and it is design that enables stewardship.
T here is some tradition of this within architecture too, in
addition to industrial and media design. Embedded design intelligence
at the heart of the mid-century London County Council architecture
department, for instance, not only led the development of much of
modern London, such as the South Bank, but also proved a rich
— 102 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

training ground for influential firms such as Archigram and the
Smithsons. It was the world’s largest architect’s office by 1952-3,
with more than 1,500 architects, as well as model-makers, furniture
designers, quantity surveyors, artists — and even a sociologist.
Span Developments is a modern-day example; a property
developer set up by two architects — Eric Lyons and Geoffrey
Townsend. Legally, Townsend had to stop being an architect in order
to become the developer because of RIBA rules — rather telling that
— whereas Lyons remained the in-house architectural lead.
Having design at the core of the business enabled it to produce
housing that has retained its value in numerous ways. Span built more
than 2,000 homes in and around London during the 1960s, and Span
houses are now sought-after examples of a gentle English modernism.
T he houses both reinvent and work within the suburban model; the
estates are largely car-free, and feature large communal gardens (a
landscape designer, Ivor Cunningham, was the third head of the
business). T hey have retained market value and design value for over
half a century — it is perhaps no accident that design was embedded
within the business, rather than pitched in from outside.
Only from within can genuine contextual change occur. T his is
perhaps the deepest flaw in the “design thinking” consultancy model,
and not something you hear the likes of McKinsey, KPMG, and
PriceWaterhouseCoopers talking about much either.
Part of the issue for “the outsiders” is that strategic design
solutions may not be “traceable” enough to validate the sales pitch of
external consultancy.
Hugh Dubberly collected a “compendium of models” describing
numerous approaches to design practice (Dubberly, 2004). T he
variety in that collection, as you might imagine, rather outstrips
— 103 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Rotman’s guide, and the compendium will have expanded since, as
design itself has expanded in remit.
“Design is no longer concerned only with things. Increasingly,
design is concerned with systems — and now systems of
systems or ecologies. In a sense, these systems are alive. They
grow and co-evolve. Designers and product managers cannot
always control them. Instead, they must create conditions in
which they can emerge and flourish. All this requires new
thinking and new knowledge. It requires design practice to
learn.” (Dubberly, 2011)
Seeing like a system, and acting upon a system, means that
traceability — clarifying one’s impact upon the system in detail — is
complex, if not virtually impossible, given the systems in question.
As we’ve seen, the architecture of projects in these spaces is more
“small pieces, loosely joined”, in the words of David Weinberger,
rather than tightly bounded projects with clear duration and
accountability.
[14]
T his is challenging for any number of traditional approaches or
disciplines, whether they’re worried about proof of agency,
“delivering results”, or concerned about authorship. Common to most
of those starting to feel a little queasy given the wooly idea of
creating conditions for out-of-control systems, whether MBAs or
architects, is a position on the “outside” of outsourced consultancy.
With the worked example described earlier, within the BBC
iPlayer design process, it is difficult to connect the regrading of
client-side developers, for instance, to a particular outcome in the
final product or service. Overall, system performance would have
improved, but it’s difficult to pursue a linear bounded framework to
understand just how, particularly over the course of four to five years.
Consultancy fees would not — and should not, given that this is public
— 104 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

money — stretch that far; equally, there is a limit to what the
outsider can see. Recall that work was described more in terms of the
non-linear, potentially aleatoric, real-time system of playing central
midfield in a football team than the lean processes of the Toyota
Production System.
T his is more a butterfly flapping its wings than simple cause and
effect. More like Brennan’s ball of wool than Six Sigma. It does not
mean they do not produce value; simply that through the lens of
external consultancy it might be difficult to tell. T his is really only a
problem for external consultancy.
T his is not to say that an external perspective isn’t an
important part of any strategic process — it is. It’s just that the usual
artefacts of consultancy — the research, the workshops, the reports
— do not change the actors inside the organisation. After the
consultant leaves, the organisation is left with the same people being
asked to deliver the recommendations in a report that was written by
people without a long-term interest in the organisation.
T his is something that the design-thinking crowd will rarely
admit. Design thinking is usually predicated on an outside influence
(design thinking) being absorbed into an organisation via the
mechanism of a consultancy agreement (almost by necessity, short-
term and restricted in brief). It will talk more about mindset change in
existing staff than actively engaging with re-positioning and inserting
strategic design capacity into the organisation.
T his last apparent oversight may be because building capacity
within an organisation reduces that organisation’s reliance on external
consultancy. Design thinking consultants would be talking themselves
out of a job if they recommended the best answer: to possess a
strategic design capacity within the organisation.
— 105 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

T raditionally, the management consultant delves into dark
matter.
T raditionally, the design consultant delivers observable matter.
T he strategic designer moves between both, deploying
observable matter to ensure that dark matter is addressed, and
addressing dark matter to better deploy observable matter.
With this perspective, management consultancy and design
consultancy may be fundamentally flawed. T heir focus tends to be
limited to one or the other, but has no real toolkit for addressing the
symbiotic relationship between both. In part, this explains the poor
performance of both sectors when judged against any remotely
sophisticated value set.
T hose assessing civil service and public service in particular
have noted that a world of decentralised and outsourced services and
complex policy problems leaves current policy-making models rather
short. T hey are rarely equipped to assess quality in delivery, or to
even perceive the edges of the systems they work within.
Design, an integrative discipline, is well suited to hovering
between things, understanding intersections and edges, assembling
through synthesis rather than funneling through analysis. T he HDL
Studio experience suggests that sketches derived from synthesis can
deliver policy-makers with forms of insight better suited to these
complex systems. It short-circuits traditional analysis.
Yet to genuinely perceive the various systems at play within
decision-making — the architecture of the problem — design must be
embedded within, and positioned strategically ie with a remit to
reconceive and reframe strategic intent.
Equally, design must be placed just so in order to truly engage
with stewardship, with ensuring that the strategic intent — the design
— is carried through into delivery, into execution.
— 106 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Design thinking, predicated on the consultancy model imbuing
the organisation with “designerly” characteristics before moving on,
simply cannot do either of these elements professionally.
Understanding the architecture of the problem, and then ensuring the
ongoing delivery of the solution, cannot be done with the necessary
rigour and agency unless from within the organisation. After all, these
two functions are essentially what organisations are — strategy and
execution. How could they be outsourced?
Brown is right to see IDEO’s case studies as “powerful
argument(s) for the design thinker ’s gambit of handing off the tools
of design to the people who will ultimately be responsible for
implementing them”. Understanding the potential value of
observation, divergent and then convergent thinking, prototyping
and experimentation will likely be of immense value within most
organisations.
It’s just that this will not be enough.
First of all, design is a practice, not a set of tools. T hose people
are not suddenly designers, for all the value in them seeing their
working environment differently; just as someone receiving a set of
steak knives is not suddenly Elizabeth David.
Secondly, it may be a distraction to have everyone “thinking
like a designer”. Design is not so important that everyone has to do
it, after all.
T hirdly, it does not allow room for professional design expertise
to add insight. Note that this is “add” insight. One of the clearest
points in Brown’s book, and the entire design-thinking oeuvre, is that
insight, value, ideas can come from anywhere within an organisation,
community, context, environment. Yet this is hardly a radical
proposition after two decades of the internet, building on several
— 107 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

decades of postmodernity, have destabilised long-held notions of
authority and knowledge construction, and identity.
So design thinking is of limited value in terms of enabling
genuine systemic or strategic change. It is simply not enough, as its
original boosters are perhaps now realising.
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

WHAT IS THE POINT?
T HE NEW DESIGN CHALLENGE
A different project from recent history: a pitch for a national plan
for Kazakhstan, run from Australia. After around six months of high-
level discussion, apparently very close to the key decision-makers
responsible for the project and often through a form of loosely joined
“Chinese whispers” (Kazakh whispers?) in and out of Astana’s
corridors of power, the job was lost. To no one’s particular surprise,
the brief went to local planners, rather closer to the aforementioned
corridors.
However, the opportunity to conduct a form of design work at
the scale of a nation was intriguing and beguiling. One can’t design
culture, but it should be possible to shape the conditions in which
society and culture unfolds to some extent. Indeed, that is the role of
policy. Recalling Colligan’s remark that policy makes design decisions
all the time, without realising it, the notion of raising awareness of
strategic design within national policy debates is increasingly
interesting.
Design has to earn the right to a seat at the table, though.
During the Postopolis! LA event in 2009, just as the initial scale of
the global financial crisis was understood, several sets of architects
suggested their potential value to the White House administration in
terms of getting the USA “back on track”. T he most interesting,
radical and progressive idea on that theme at the conference was
Benjamin Bratton’s “resist the recovery”, which engaged in political
and cultural systems; yet few of the other tentative proposals by
— 109 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

architects seemed particularly thought-through. T here was little idea
of exactly what they might offer, other than a vague “designerly”
way of being — surely that would be of some use? T he lasting
impression was of a desperate lunge at the half-chance of meaningful,
profitable work, given the rapidly diminishing opportunities for
architect-friendly construction projects.
A somewhat unfair characterisation — in most cases, the
intentions were no doubt honourable — but it demonstrated the
paucity of thinking and ambition of the design-thinking movement.
It also demonstrates how much of an outsider the design
community is, or has become. T he general lack of vocabulary and
unfamiliarity with the landscape of that world was telling, just as we
see polite yet vaguely mystified looks on the faces of policymakers
when it’s suggested that design may have something to offer.
Designers stumble around like strangers in a strange land when
entering this terrain. We are not trained to address the world of policy
and governance. Our universe starts with pixels, plastic, hemlines and
loggia rather than white papers, sub-committees, argument maps and
political capital.
Yet there may be great value in strategic designers addressing
society at this level, rather than through the typical channels of
products and services. T he challenge here is to understand and wrangle
with this dark matter in order to outline a more constructive set of
trajectories for society.
T HE NEXT NORDIC MODEL
So what might a strategic design challenge look like at this scale?
“In Studio” describes three examples of strategic design
challenges in detail, approaching ageing population, sustainability and
the built environment, and education. Each of these was located in
— 110 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

the context of Finland, each supported by a briefing and a set of
discussions that unpacked their local context.
Finland itself is variously located in the context of a slippery
concept known as the Nordic Model. As with other Nordic countries,
this notional model (see The Nordic Model, Mary Hilson 2008)
pervades much of the way that Finland’s culture unfolds, how business
is conducted, and the content of the social contract, the relationship
between citizens and government. T he Nordic Model has also been
hugely influential outside the region, despite its origins in a “small,
scarcely-populated region on the margins of Europe”, in Hilson’s
words.
“Many of the academics who have studied the Nordic region
have done so from an explicit position of approval or
admiration for societies that seem to differ in important ways
from other parts of the world … (It was) a model that would
bear emulation by other societies.” (Mary Hilson)
T he particular influence is slippery, however. If the image of the
Nordic region can be focused on anything — other than a curious mix
of socialist utopia and designer goods powerhouse, of high standards
of living and high numbers of suicides, of sexual permissiveness and
artistic freedom and over-regulated collective conformity — then it is
the idea of the progressive welfare state.
T he Nordic Model has been seen as “a model (or a warning)”,
according to Hilson, with the warning perhaps coming from those
who recognised the cultural difference to the increasingly dominant
Anglo-American model developed from the early 1980s.
Early on in her book, Hilson presents what she says is an over-
simplification of the origins of a shared sensibility across the Nordic
region. Yet that over-simplification posits a useful insight
nonetheless, suggesting that the Nordic Model is based on the
— 111 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

“successful reconciliation of the apparently oppositional
Enlightenment traditions of equality and liberty. National
Romanticism had a relatively limited impact on the Nordic countries,
allowing the liberal respect for individual liberty to flourish alongside
peasant traditions of collectivism and community.”
In other words, the Nordic Model found a third way, roughly
equidistant from capitalism and communism. Within the Nordic
countries, this was highly variable, with Finland quite different to
Sweden, which was in turn quite different to Denmark, Norway and
Iceland.
Yet despite the over-simplification and the local variation, this
balancing of social equity with significant commercial success is
shared across the region and certainly visible within Finland.
FINLAND IS FLAT
Finland is flat. T here are few mountains to speak of, and a large part
of the country is lake and forest. T he patterns of Finnish speech are
relatively flat, particularly compared with the sing-song patterns of
some of their Nordic neighbours. T he Baltic Sea is often calm to the
extent that it too is, well, flat. T he skylines of its cities are
essentially an even six to 10-storey canopy, almost uniformly
stretching to its boundaries, punctuated only by the odd church spire.
And the society itself is flat, in that levels of income inequality
are extremely low, and there are few barriers to social mobility within
what is already a relatively non-stratified culture. Perhaps even sauna
culture has a flattening effect — it is difficult to retain hierarchy
when everyone is naked.
T he role of government here is significant. Finland’s education
system is world-renowned, usually first or second in measures of
maths, science and reading, and essentially public and free. Pre-school
— 112 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

children in Helsinki benefit from the päiväkoti (daycare) system,
which includes daily hot meals. Similar conditions apply to its free
public healthcare systems. Likewise, the supportive social services.
Likewise, the quality and availability of public transport in its cities,
in which you get free travel if you’re carrying a pram (with child,
ideally). Although it has been growing in recent years, income
inequality in the Nordic nations is still the lowest in the OECD. T he
gap between male and female employment rates in Finland is less than
three percentage points, among the smallest in the world, and it
boasts one of the highest rates of women returning to work after
childbirth.
Urban development is aided by the fact that, in Helsinki, the
city owns around 70% of the land. Here, Helsinki can pull levers that
other cities have simply sold off. Some 90% of Helsinki apartments
benefit from district heating, meaning everyone has the same heat
and energy sources. T he cities are largely bereft of architectural
jewels, save a few Alvar Aalto and Eliel Saarinen classics, but there is
a consistently high quality across the board, almost a nondescript
everyday architectural standard in which nothing is bad but nothing is
particularly great. People enjoy unfettered access to the country via
rights that enshrine the right to walk, ski, cycle, camp, swim, sail,
fish, pick berries and so on. T here is a clear and shared public, or
civic, responsibility to many aspects of life, articulated in extremely
simple agreements about who is responsible for clearing snow from
the streets in winter, say.
T hese key components of the Nordic Model, then, indicate a
strong state and an effective government, with significant levels of
public ownership and decision-making as compared with other western
models. Yet levels of public debt are relatively low, indicating an
effective and efficient public sector. Note, however, that this
— 113 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

comparative public sector effectiveness is balanced by strong
performance from the private sector. “Household name” brands
originating from the Nordic region comprise success stories such as
Saab, Volvo, Ericsson, Nokia, Kone, Bang + Olufsen, Iitalla,
Marimekko, Fiskars, H+M, Fritz Hansen, Ikea, Lego, Electrolux,
Tandberg, Linux, Opera, Spotify, Rovio …
Generally, then, the Nordic Model produces extraordinary
results, balancing commercial innovation with public-sector
effectiveness, a welfare state with low public debt, modernity with
equality.
As this simple diagram suggests, the “spirit level” society (after
Wilkinson and Pickett’s influential 2009 book) produces a high and
even standard across the population. T his abstract form might
describe educational standards, income equality, architectural quality,
gender equality and so on, suggesting average-to-good results for all.
— 114 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

It also suggests that this egalitarian flatness is achieved at the
expense of ranges of experience and possibility. T he band is high, but
narrow, and doesn’t vary much.
For instance, it is a lazy critique but the Finnish education
system topping the world rankings has been put down to its relative
homogeneity. Put at its bluntest, the critique suggests that it’s easy to
make the same system work for everyone when everyone is the same.
As noted above, the urban realm is of consistently good quality
but also can be generally said to be lacking inspiration. Food and drink
culture can be equally bland and uninspiring, despite some significant
improvements in recent years. Accusations can be, and are, levelled in
terms of the “conformity” of the culture. Similarly, there is the
perception of an overly technocratic or engineering culture reaching
outside of its traditional areas of concern. Perhaps the same
— 115 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

mentality that keeps Helsinki-Vantaa airport open and operational
24/7, year after year, even when under metres of snow at -25C, is not
necessarily the same mentality one wants running street food
licensing or urban planning?
Yet does it really matter if there is a limited range of
experience, when the average is so good? T he instincts behind the
Finnish education system are right, of course. If one was responsible
for a nation’s education system, surely the ethical thing to do is to
ensure as high a standard as possible for everyone equally.
T his is true, but the limited range of experience produces several
issues.
One is perhaps less important, at least at face value. It concerns
the changing expectations of quality of life in Finland as a globally
connected country. With a strategy oriented towards service industries
and knowledge economies, and situated within increasingly densely
connected global flows of people, trade and culture, Finland will
require a broader range of experience than it currently has in order to
draw workers in those sectors. T his need not be couched in terms of
some kind of Richard Florida-friendly footloose global elite, moving
from city to city as they dip or soar up and down the Monocle quality
of life rankings, but more in terms of anyone who can make a choice
about their work can also now choose, to some extent, where to live.
In competition with the likes of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin,
Warsaw, St Petersburg and others, Helsinki in particular has to offer a
more diverse set of private and public services, experiences and spaces
than it does currently.
T his is delicate territory: some would say that conformity and
homogeneity are simply the other side of the coin marked social
cohesion and community. Indeed, the platform enabled by the Nordic
idea of the collective good can currently be said to be delivering better
— 116 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

outcomes than the notion of individuals motivated by self-interest,
despite the hegemony of the last few decades.
DIVERSIT Y FOR RESILIENCE
So quality and diversity of experience and amenity is certainly
important. But the other qualifier on the “spirit level” is more
important, and it is to do with the way that Finland is changing. T he
country, for so long a relatively homogenous culture, is becoming
more diverse:
“Finland’s foreign-born citizens make up just 5% of its
population, compared to about 11.5% in the UK. But, over
the last 15 years, Finland has diversified at a faster rate than
any other European country. By 2020, a fifth of Helsinki’s
pupils are expected to have been born elsewhere.” (The
Guardian, 21 November 2011)
T here ought to be little doubt that such an increase in diversity
is a good thing — economically and culturally — and yet it does serve
to make education, healthcare and patterns of habitation, for
example, more complex, partly because of a more diverse set of needs
and drivers to take into account in such systems, and partly due to the
resistance that immigration often stirs up.
Either way, the ability to make long-term investments on the
basis of anticipating these changes is being directly challenged as a
result. It is simply harder to build consensus around investments when
the population is more diverse. And given the nature of the problems
at hand, long-term investments are what is required.
Increasing diversity is important because it can produce
resilience. If we see the Finnish incarnation of the Nordic Model as a
steady state system for some years, as per the diagram above, it also
seems clear that a more diverse version of this system could produce
— 117 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

“wobbles” in this straightened experience. Our thought is to ensure
that these challenges are absorbed by a system that becomes more
resilient as a result.
T he ecologist CS Holling wrote that “placing a system in a
straitjacket of constancy can cause fragility to evolve”. Conversely,
one of the more influential systems thinkers and educators, Donella H
Meadows, described resilience as “a measure of a system’s ability to
survive and persist within a variable environment”.
We are interested in finding a way for an augmented Nordic
Model to not only survive and persist, but also to thrive, in the
increasingly variable environment it now finds itself in.
We can look at an equivalent system that almost over-produces
diversity. Let’s call it the Anglo model, drawn as it is from a broad
brush depiction of the UK, USA and Australia. T hese English-
speaking countries tend to produce a wide diversity of outcomes,
across almost all the systems described above. T his is essentially due
to a market-driven approach, deep in the culture of all three
countries.
So the diagram for the Anglo Model looks like this, with a series
of spikes of innovation, but also “troughs” of drop-out. In education,
this means you get the odd Harvard and MIT, but much of the
education system is of a much lower standard than in the Nordic
Model. Income levels are similarly variable, with income inequality in
the UK and the US particularly extreme compared with other OECD
nations. Sharp, tall spikes for CEOs and bankers; massive drop-outs
below.
— 118 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

With these system abstraction diagrams, the overall median is
lower than in the Nordic Model, but the variation is considerable. It
is, perhaps, an exercise in unfettered “diversity” not tending towards
resilience. As the OECD notes, the income inequality leads to
decreased social mobility in the US and the UK, rather than a fluid
system.
T he deteriorating social contract mentioned earlier means little
holds this system together. Innovation is produced as a result, though
the innovation is often without direction, and the overall system now
tends to fragmentation and conflict.
T hus the challenge is to draw these useful “spikes” of
innovation into the Nordic Model while retaining the high baseline of
the system, such that it can explore diversity “above” that line. So
— 119 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

can Finland draw from the benefits of diversity without forgoing the
high baseline that the Nordic Model has delivered?
T he HDL Studio on Education explored this tension in
particular. T hey found that education in Finland was intrinsically linked to the understanding of fairness embedded within Finnish culture, which had created a system predicated on equal access to education. T he Studio suggested that this notion of equal access might need to develop into an “equal opportunity to develop individual talents and aspirations”. Over and above Sir Ken Robinson et al’s suggestions around divergent thinking, this is also concerned with “how well [the system] handles diversity” to be successful.
WHY SYST EMS MUST LEARN BY ABSORBING DIVERSIT Y
— 120 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

As we have seen, global unrest can be read as a sign of the essential
fabric of nation states beginning to unravel, with the traditional sets
of ties — nationality, ethnicity, religion, corporation, family — all in
often radically different modes to that of two generations ago. Many
would, rightly, see this increasing social and cultural diversity as A
Good T hing. However, it presents a challenge to systems, such as
governance and public service, built in another age. It places the static
system in tension; a suddenly rigid system becomes brittle.
For warning lights on the dashboard, we might look to the 2011
elections in Finland. T here, the T rue Finns party capitalised on these
emerging fissures in national identity. Described by the BBC as anti-
immigration and xenophobic (a charge that has been vehemently
denied by the party) and by the Financial T imes as “Europe’s Tea
Party”, the T rue Finns took 19.1% of the vote, ultimately becoming
the largest opposition party in parliament. Whether one buys that
portrayal or not, there can be no doubt that the T rue Finns are
productively making hay from immigration issues, and from Finland’s
involvement in the EU and eurozone debt crisis.
For more extreme indicators again, we look to Athens, Wall
Street, Madrid, London, each indicating a loss of faith in governance
at the scale of nation state, each linked to an inability to make
decisions at the institutional level.
But most extreme of all, and in the Nordic context, the mass
murder committed by Anders Breivik against the government, the
civilian population and a summer camp in Norway on 22 July 2011
was rather more than a warning sign. Although clearly the work of a
psychopath, who would perhaps have carried out a similarly appalling
act no matter the wider political climate, several at the time
connected Breivik’s atrocity to a wider culture that has dangerously
“allowed” such extreme voices to flourish. Recall the October report
— 121 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

from Demos, concerning the spread of “hardline nationalist
sentiment” among young men in Europe, and how their “generalised
fear about the future is focused on cultural identity”.
T he historian Tony Judt, in his memoir The Memory Chalet
(2010) sees a extremely negative scenario emerging:
“We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. It is not
just the terrorists, the bankers, and the climate that are going
to wreak havoc with our sense of security and stability.
Globalization itself ... will be a source of fear and uncertainty
to billions of people who will turn to their leaders for
protection. ‘Identities’ will grow mean and tight, as the
indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of
gated communities from Delhi to Dallas ... Being ‘Danish’ or
‘Italian’, ‘American’ or ‘European’ won’t just be an identity; it
will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. The
state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its
own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-
holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps.
Intolerant demagogues in established democracies will
demand ‘tests’ — of knowledge, of language, of attitude — to
determine whether desperate newcomers are deserving of
British or Dutch or French ‘identity’. They are already doing
so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the
marginals: the edge people.” (Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet,
2010)
We must anticipate increasing diversity — and its potential
corollary in the mean withdrawal that Judt writes about — and orient
its power constructively for nations such as Finland, in order to help
avoid such catastrophes in the worst case, and to ensure that the
success of the country continues, if not advances, in the best case.
— 122 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Again, creating a culture of decision-making that could help
achieve such a result would provide a model for the 21st century,
much as some have seen the Nordic nations as providing a successful
model for the late-20th century nation state.
CASE #4: FROM T HE PÄIVÄKOT I T O T HE CAMIONET T E —
PROT OT YPING A DIVERSE FOOD ECOSYST EM
What might addressing this system mean in practice? T hough it
might seem initially odd, our more recent explorations have been
through food systems. Food can be a useful proxy through which to
assess the extent and diversity of numerous interlocking systems, but
also to understand the dynamics of these systems.
Looking at the diversity of street food available within a city,
for instance, might help unlock systemic elements around use of
public space, the street as a platform for innovation,
entrepreneurship and experimentation in dining, different
perspectives on food preparation and hygiene, strategies for handling
waste, ways of intervening in a culture of late-night drinking,
preventative health, safety, logistics, local and seasonal produce, a
richer understanding of the value of immigration, a form of demand-
led provision of street food driven by “smart city” mobile services,
and so on.
In this particular case study, we are interested in how food might
exemplify aspects of the system discussion above, and the role that
strategic design might play in driving food systems forward in that
light; absorbing diversity to expand experience, develop resilience and
retain a high baseline.
Street food, in this case, is the MacGuffin; it is driving the
discussions and projects that we are using to explore the idea of an
augmented Nordic Model.
— 123 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Street food in Helsinki has recently been given a shock of
diversity into its system. Dominated by the model of kiosks at street-
corners, the city essentially offers very basic fare: metal boxes called
grilli that serve fatty sausages to late-night drinkers; traditional kiosks
selling coffee and pastries to tourists; and ice-cream stands. T he City
of Helsinki tightly administers leases for these, and controls quality
through comparatively high food-hygiene standards (higher than EU
regulations) and only a handful of public spaces are deemed
appropriate for street food. It’s a classic example of the narrow,
moderately performing yet equitable system.
Yet early in 2011, something new appeared on this scene, in the
form of a retrofitted old Citröen van selling crépes 24/7 at Kamppi,
the central public space and shopping centre in Helsinki. Started by a
young entrepreneur, the Camionette had driven extremely slowly
through two years of negotiation with the city council, securing
numerous permits across at least four departments. T he city had said
no at first, before the entrepreneur used Facebook and a local
newspaper to drum up interest in his cause. T he city quickly had to
back down. T his part of Helsinki now has an alternative to the metal
grilli a few metres away, extending the range of possibility in the
centre while challenging the city’s perception of what street food can
be.
T his particular “spike of innovation” occurred at roughly the
same time as an event called Ravinotolapäiva, or Restaurant Day.
T his near-guerilla activity involves people setting up any kind of
“pop-up restaurant” on one day, anywhere in the city. From the
Ravinotolapäiva website:
“Restaurant Day is a day when anyone and everyone is
encouraged to open a pop-up restaurant, café or bar. Just for
— 124 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

the day ... No permission, no rules, just plain fun ... every city
needs more no-strings fun.”
As the project cheekily hints, this “no-strings fun” is not
strictly legal, but there’s little the city council can do about it.
Ravintolapäiva is an incredibly light-touch organisation — Facebook,
essentially — and there are no requirements; it’s essentially an idea.
As a result, it has spread like wildfire. An organisation with no
organisation has no chance of developing inertia, after all.
According to the Helsinki’s Food Culture Strategy project
manager, Ville Relander, both of these “spikes” have enriched the
city’s food culture no end. Yet Ravintolapäiva is limited in time (it
exists for one day only) and the Camionette is limited in space (it
exists in one place only). So the change is not systemic yet.
So what happens the day after Restaurant Day? Nothing.
At the other end of the system, sits the city’s small, distributed
kindergartens and day-care centres (päiväkoti). T hese are generally
administered by the city in most cases, who also provide subsidies if
they are private. Hot school meals are served in all päiväkoti every
day. As a result, the city council runs the biggest kitchen in the city,
albeit in distributed form, serving 100,000s of meals each day.
T he päiväkoti is the kind of governmental “lever” that
exemplifies the Nordic Model. For example, it enables the City’s
Food Culture Strategy to say that half of all the meals served in the
päiväkoti will be organic by 2015. T his simply could not happen as
clearly, as cleanly, as in the Anglo Model described above. T here is no
lever there. Switching the food served in Australian kindergartens,
say, would be difficult, as there is essentially no food served in
Australian kindergartens. Parents make packed lunches for their
children; how would this system become organic by 2015, say? T he
— 125 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

state writes to parents and asks them to kindly make sandwiches with
organic ingredients?
T hey’d probably get sued.
Of course, the wealthier parents might well use organic
ingredients in their children’s lunchboxes, but the pattern of
distribution might well emulate the Anglo system diagram again —
organic food for a few; unknown or poor quality food for many.
So the päiväkoti is a powerful system providing a solid
mainstream experience for everyone. Yet the system has now been
joined by a couple of different isolated examples of diversity, the
Camionette and Ravintolapäivä.
What has not happened yet in Finland, however, is linking both
sides of this diagram, finding a way to connect the diversity and
innovation at the entrepreneurial end with the capacity for systemic
change at the governmental end (in this immediate case, to connect
the fast-moving layers of street food with the necessarily slower-
moving layers of kindergartens and licensing).
In short, one possibility of the augmented Nordic Model is to
enable innovation from the entrepreneur to be absorbed into the
system; to bind the range of possibilities inherent in small-scale
innovation to the sheer transformative power of Nordic government
— without destabilising the potency and valency of either.
Within Low2No, Sitra is exploring the idea of creating such
spikes in local street food culture. T he challenge is to select the right
MacGuffin, the right T rojan Horse, the right platform to understand,
articulate and exert the connection between street food and more
mainstream networks, such as school food and supermarket food
retail. T his could involve designing, prototyping and operating new
street food offers themselves, while embedded in the dark matter of
— 126 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

food-safety regulations, urban planning, public-works procedures, and
the way that city governance operates.
We have to hover above the problem at this level of
governance to engage with the city council’s regulations, organisation
and positioning regarding street food. In early conversations with the
city, it is clear to see how the Camionette situation emerged, and yet
it is also possible to perceive some potential rewirings that might
derive greater strategic benefit for food and the city, and beyond. But
understanding the cultures of decision-making takes time and
sensitivity. It also takes something different to separate the figure
from the ground, to jolt the system’s culture to describe itself.
We also have to locate ourselves at street level, in a particular
project involving physical matter. T his ensures that dark matter is
flushed out, articulated, tested. Although design is more commonly
thought of at this smaller scale, and certainly easier to produce,
strategic design involves ensuring the intervention is not an
installation, but enables replicability and legibility, and so lasting
system change.
Systems at this scale sometimes appear beyond perception. By
analogy with the modern-day city, if we can even sense the evidence
of such a system, it feels “splendid and terrifying”, as the urbanist
Kevin Lynch put it. Yet he also promises that constructing insights
into such systems, creating legibility through intervention, is a way of
at least shifting our perception from shock and awe to something we
might master, or at least comprehend more optimistically.
“Were it legible, truly visible, then fear and confusion might be
replaced with delight in the richness and power of the scene.”
(Kevin Lynch, 1960)
But tying prototypes to the idea of an augmented Nordic Model
is still daunting. A portfolio of prototypes ensures that risk is spread
— 127 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

across the different layers, moving at different paces, in constantly
learning system. Moreover, each prototype locks into a wider context
— say, a street-food prototype draws from a smart-systems platform,
which in turn draws from a local currency system underpinning a
carbon-financing model, which sits within the context of a local
participation and decision-making platform for the community. T he
overall architecture of the problem is fleshed out. T he design focus
zooms from matter to meta and back again constantly. A diversity of
projects is created, and so the overall system learns to thrive from
diversity.
T he project context must zoom from Low2No and the local
business ecosystems to the city council’s Food Culture Strategy and
the wider context of city council organisation. And so it seeks to
connect the Camionette and the päiväkoti; or rather it begins to
describe both in the same connected system.
T his is not about replacing hot dogs with falafels, but about
building resilience into a system through diversity. It might suggest
how education, healthcare and social services could also be enriched
without losing their scale and capacity. It might enable the new
approaches to sustainability described here to be extended elsewhere.
It might even suggest how local firms develop ongoing resilience. It
ought to suggest how governance, policy-making and public service
can be reimagined for the 21st century without throwing the baby out
with the bathwater.
If the Nordic Model can be augmented with spikes of
innovation, without dropping its baseline, and make legible the seams
of this next Nordic Model, it might not only be looked at with
admiration (or disdain) from afar, but provide a guide for other
cultures of decision-making elsewhere. It might prove to be a model
worth following.
— 128 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

It might even help in solving the conundrum facing all Nordic
countries, virtually all European nations, and many other developed
nations elsewhere: how to continue to pay for the welfare state?
Over the last decade, many public administrations have looked
to efficiency gains and reform through ICT. However, speaking at
Cisco’s Public Services Summit in Oslo, December 2011, Manuel
Castells described how most ICT-led interventions into healthcare or
e-government had not produced the gains promised, because such
programmes had not embarked on genuine reform (generally looking
instead to enable efficiency gains, they had instead reduced quality of
service, irresponsibly undermining the entire enterprise). He didn’t
use these words, but such programmes had not considered the “dark
matter” (he referred instead to Michel Foucault’s notion of “micro-
powers”).
A combination play of ICT culture, service design and strategic
design, moving back and forth from matter to meta, and earning a
mandate for reform and redesign, would perhaps be more fruitful.
T he idea of taking on the Nordic Model, or indeed attempting
to engender systemic change within Finland is open to accusations of
hubris, even arrogance, never mind doubts as to the efficacy of such a
venture. And yet systemic change is what policy is often trying to
enable after all, at the national level as well as the local.
T his is not the redesign of a nation state as such, although it’s
worth reflecting that nation states are a creation, an artefact. T he
nation has always been a design project, articulated through
boundaries, maps, flags and insignia. Instead, this is understanding the
cultures of decision-making at play in Finland, and assessing how to
constructively move them forwards.
And so the larger project has a direction. T his is a strategic
design challenge.
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?
ST RAT EGIC DESIGN IN SUMMARY
As opposed to engineering, with its focus on problem solving,
strategic design is oriented towards questioning the question,
reframing if necessary.
As opposed to policy-making expertise, with its focus on the
creation of models, strategic design is predisposed to sketching and
iterative prototyping as a learning mechanism, while engaging in
stewardship to ensure that user-centredness and design intent is
realised in delivery.
As opposed to particular content expertise, focused within a
bounded discipline, strategic design’s discipline is in integrative
systems thinking rather than a form of path dependency, and is able
to move freely across disciplines rather than within them, revelling in
the complexity of a more holistic understanding of the system.
As opposed to management consultancy, strategic design’s
embedded positioning enables the long-term view, a richer production
process, and provides the authority to enact organisational or
contextual change, while also using its production skills to create
tangible prototypes and outcomes as a strategic act, generating
learning and momentum through doing.
As opposed to creating the intervention or one-off, strategic
design’s interests are in the replicable and systemic, and thus require
engaging with the dark matter of organisations, policy, culture and
other forms of context.
— 13
0 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

As opposed to traditional design practice, strategic design
attempts to move beyond products, services and spaces into
relationships, contexts, and strategies, yet without losing sight of the
symbiotic relationship between meta and matter, and genuinely
engaging with the public and civic as much as with the commercial.
As we have seen, in terms of design practice, strategic design at
systemic scale is about this zoom from matter to meta, or rather, the
importance of designing both the matter (the objects, spaces,
services) at the same time as the meta (the context, the organisation,
the culture). Strategy is enacted through a focus on the quality of
execution, rather than an abstract model.
Replicability of solutions, derived from delivering projects,
enables systemic changes that are allied to the public good.
Strategic design tries to ally pragmatism with imagination,
deliver research through prototyping, enable learning from execution,
pursue communication through tangible projects, and balance strategic
intent and political capital with iterative action, systems thinking and
user-centredness.
T his is all underscored by an optimistic belief in progressive
change, that the current conditions are changeable for the better, that
the present can be transformed into multiple positive futures. Path
dependency can be a useful force, such that strategies can be built on
culture, history and the other inherent qualities of a context, yet it
does not weigh solutions down unnecessarily.
Finally, strategic design is embedded within organisations, and
particularly within public bodies that are reoriented towards leadership
and directed innovation once again. T his also means that innovative
capacity has a direction, an end as well as a means.
AND T O WHAT END?
— 13
1 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Government and public service is too important for it to fail through
lack of care; through the simple inability of yesterday’s funding model
or accumulated political capital to simply continue into the future.
While this is a challenge on an immense scale — an unknown-
unknown in terms of problems — it does not mean that we should not
take it on.
T he Nordic Model in particular also cannot be allowed to wither,
given the shining example it has set for so many and the
extraordinary results it has produced. A population that is ageing and
diversifying should not, in itself, be enough of a “problem” that it
simply causes the entire house of cards to collapse. Either facet could
be reconceived as an asset.
Today, these relations between the state, the market and civil
society are the design challenge. In particular, in the light of events
over the last two decades, the social contract needs to be
reformulated.
T hose last two decades have seen western nations undergoing
economic boom and bust, the only constant the diminishing status of
government (sometimes in inverse relationship to its public debt).
Emerging economies have seen boom and boom, economically, with
only the occasional dab on the brakes, yet serious challenges have
arisen for governments nonetheless, such as the awkward relationship
with democracy sometimes seen in East Asia and the Middle East. In
either case, as we have seen, the scale and complexity of the
challenges now faced by governments are without precedent.
Judging by the now-persistent turmoil — in markets, in
parliament, on the street — the contract that defines how most
developed nations and economies should work has long since expired,
and people know it. Indeed, it seems that yesterday’s set of social
contracts is visibly crumbling.
— 13
2 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

T he significant stress fractures of social unrest that have
emerged on the streets of Athens, Cairo, London, Madrid, Toronto
and New York are partly indications of poor social-contract design. It
is not often talked about in that respect; indeed, it’s all too possible to
find people in positions of influence who don’t even know what the
social contract means.
We need to understand more about the various cultures of
decision-making in play across the globe. We also need to believe that
they can be improved through the strategic application of design.
T his may be important for design itself, in that it provides a
genuinely meaningful point to the entire enterprise.
But, more importantly, we need to believe that reorienting our
various cultures of decision-making may be the only civilised way
forward.
— 13
3 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

REFERENCES
Kurt Andersen, quoted in “Kurt Andersen and Douglas Rushkoff I”,
Change Observer , 29 July 2009
http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=9877
Edmund L. Andrews, “Greenspan Concedes Error on
Regulation”, New York T imes, October 23 2008
Tony Barber, “Enter the technocrats”, Financial Times,
November 12 2011
Tony Barber, “T he frustrations of T rue Finns tap into Europe’s
Tea Party”, Financial Times, 22 April 2011
BBC News, “T rue Finns’ nationalism colours Finland election”,
15 April 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13091920
Martin Bechthold and Anthony Kane, “Low2No: Strategies for
Carbon Neutrality”, Harvard University Graduate School of Design,
2011
Richard Blythe, quoted by Gerard Reinmuth, as a comment on
‘Potential Futures for Design Practice’ by Rory Hyde, December 30 2010 http://roryhyde.com/blog/?p=614
Jocelyne Bourgon, A New Synthesis of Public Administration,
2011
Bryan Boyer, Justin W. Cook and Marco Steinberg, In Studio:
Recipes for Systemic Change, 2011
Stewart Brand, Clock of the Long Now, 2000
Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, 1994
David Brooks, The Social Animal, 2011
— 13
4 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Emily Campbell, You know more than you think you do: design
as resourcefulness & self-reliance, RSA Design and Society, 2009
T ristram Carfrae, conversation, Arup, 2009
Manuel Castells, presentation at Cisco Public Services Summit,
Oslo, 10 December 2011
Philip Colligan, “What does it mean to design public services?”,
The Guardian, 1 September 2011
Paul Dourish, Where The Action Is: The Foundations of
Embodied Interaction, 2001
Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen, Fast Strategy: How strategic
agility will help you stay ahead of the game, 2008
Mark Duguid, “Hitchcock and the MacGuffin”, BFIScreenOnline
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tours/hitch/tour6.html
Hugh Dubberly, How Do You Design? A compendium of models,
2004
Hugh Dubberly, “Imagine Design Create”, interview, March
2011
Frank Duffy, Work and The City, 2008
The Economist, “Baby Blues: A juggler ’s guide to having it all”,
November 26th 2011
Robert Fabricant, “3 T hings Wile E. Coyote Teaches Us About
Creative Intelligence”, Fast Co.Design, April 12 2011
Norman Foster, “A tribute to the Chairman of Apple”, Domus,
6 October 2011
T homas L. Friedman, “Something’s Happening Here”, New York
Times, October 11 2011 Helsinki Design Lab http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/
Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 1966
Mary Hilson, The Nordic Model, 2008
— 13
5 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Michael Holdsworth and Jill Rutter, “Making Policy Better:
Improving Whitehall’s core business”, Institute for Government, 2010
Gary Hustwit (dir.), Objectified, 2009
Rory Hyde, “Historian of the Future: Wouter Vanstiphout”,
Architectural Review Australia, August 12 2011
Matt Jones, presentation at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction
Design Open Lecture Series, Copenhagen, September 2011
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, 2010
Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet, 2010
Michael Kimmelman, “In Protest, the Power of Place”, New
York Times, October 15 2011
Jon Kvist, Johan Fritzell, Bjørn Hvinden and Olli Kangas (eds.),
Changing Social Equality: The Nordic welfare model in the 21st
century, 2012
David Korowicz, ‘On the cusp of collapse: complexity, energy
and the globalised economy’ in Fleeing Vesuvius, Douthwaite and
Fallon (ed.), 2011
Sanford Kwinter, Requiem for the City at the End of the
Millennium, 2010
John Lanchester, IOU, 2010
Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – An
Introduction to Making T hings Public’, 1996, In Bruno Latour &
Peter Weibel Making Things Public-Atmospheres of Democracy
catalogue of the show at ZKM, MIT Press, 2005
Jeanne Liedtka and T im Ogilvie, “Designing for growth: A
toolkit for managers”, Rotman Magazine, Spring 2011
Sid Lowe, “I’m a romantic, says Xavi Hernandez, heartbeat of
Barcelona and Spain”, The Guardian, 11 February 2011
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, 1960
— 13
6 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Ewen MacAskill and Dominic Rushe, ‘US debt crisis: hardline
revolt puts more pressure on Republican leader ’, The Guardian, 27
July 2011
Malcolm MacEwan, Crisis in Architecture, 1974 (RIBA
Publications)
Roger Martin, “T he Execution T rap”, Harvard Business
Review, July 2010
Brendan McGetrick, “T he T rajectories of Elizabeth Diller”,
Domus, 18 April 2011
Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 2008
Ken Mogg, “What’s a MacGuffin?”,
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/faqs_c.html#Answer%201
Bruce Nussbaum, “Design T hinking Is A Failed Experiment. So
What’s Next?”, Fast Co.Design, April 6th 2011
David Nye, Technology Matters: Questions To Live With, 2006
Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, 1984
Norman Potter, What Is A Designer, 1969
Noah Raford, “T he coming boom and bust of design thinking”,
January 6 2010, http://news.noahraford.com/?p=246
Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General
T heory of Planning”, Policy Sciences, Volume 4, Number 2, 1973
Royal Institute of British Architects, T he Future for Architects,
2011
Susanna Rustin, ‘Can Europe pull back from the brink?’, The
Guardian, 11 November 2011
Saskia Sassen, ‘T he challenges of our time in the city’,
interviewed by Claudia Faraone, Domus, 15 November 2011
Karsten Schmidt, presentation at Copenhagen Institute of
Interaction Design Open Lecture Series, Copenhagen, September
2011
— 13
7 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 2008
Haydn Shaugnessy, “GE’s $1 Billion Cancer Project: Raising the
Bar on Social Business”, Forbes, 11 May 2011
Phil Simon, T he Age of the Platform, 2011
Kevin Slavin, “T hose algorithms that govern our lives”,
presentation at LIFT 11 conference, 2011
Teicholz, P, “U.S. construction productivity trends”, Journal of
Construction Engineering and Management 127(5), 427-429, 2001.
Quoted in Eccles, Edmonson, T hyne and Zozul, ‘Living PlanIT ’,
Harvard Business School, March 22 2010
John T hackara, In The Bubble, 2005
Mark Townsend and Ian T raynor,”Norway attacks: How far
right views created Anders Behring Breivik”, The Guardian, 30 July
2011
UK National Audit Office, “Reorganising Central Government”,
18 March 2010
Marcus Westbury, “Cities as Software”, Volume 2010
http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2011/05/23/cities-as-software/
Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why
Equality is Better for Everyone, 2009
Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the pyramid: The history of football
tactics, 2008
Semir Zeki, ‘T he Disunity of Consciousness’, in Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 7, No. 5, May 2003
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Hill is a designer and urbanist. He works for Sitra, the Finnish
Innovation Fund, in their Strategic Design Unit in Helsinki, exploring
how design might enable positive systemic change throughout society.
Prior to Sitra, Dan was an Associate at Arup, Web & Broadcast
Director for Monocle, and Head of Interactive Technology & Design
for the BBC. He writes the blog http://cityofsound.com
, as well as
being Interaction Design Editor for Domus magazine. His essays feature in Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the
Future of Urban Space, Mark Shepard (ed.) (Architectural League &
MIT Press, 2011), Best of Technology Writing 2009, Steven Berlin
Johnson (ed.) (Yale University Press, 2010), and Actions: playing,
gardening, recycling and walking, Mirko Zardini (ed.) (Canadian
Centre for Architecture, 2008).
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

ABOUT STRELKA
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design is an
international education project launched in 2010. A post-graduate
research institute with a curriculum designed and led by Rem
Koolhaas/AMO, Strelka also hosts public lectures and workshops,
publishes books and consults on urban development.
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

OTHER TITLES IN THIS SERIES
ACROSS T HE PLAZA: T HE PUBLIC VOIDS OF T HE POST-
SOVIET CIT Y
By Owen Hatherley
EDGE CIT Y: DRIVING T HE PERIPHERY OF SÃO PAULO
By Justin McGuirk
SPLENDIDLY FANTAST IC: ARCHIT ECT URE AND POWER
GAMES IN CHINA
By Julia Lovell
T HE ACT ION IS T HE FORM: VICT OR HUGO’S T ED TALK
By Keller Easterling
T HE DOT-COM CIT Y: SILICON VALLEY URBANISM
By Alexandra Lange
MAKE IT REAL: ARCHIT ECT URE AS ENACT MENT
By Sam Jacob
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

NOTES
1 “T he idea that we have to choose between a mediocre, well-
executed strategy and a brilliant, poorly executed one is deeply flawed
— a narrow, unhelpful concept replete with unintended negative
consequences.” Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review
2
A brief sidenote on Sitra: “Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund,
is an independent public foundation promoting the wellbeing of society under the supervision of the Finnish Parliament.” (sitra.fi/en) Founded in 1967, as a kind of birthday present from the nation to the nation on the anniversary of Finland’s independence, Sitra is engaged in long-term systemic change, through project work, research and investment funding. T he Strategic Design Unit (SDU) at Sitra, led by Marco Steinberg, is a direct attempt to embed design practice at the heart of systemic change, through engaging with policy, public service, social innovation and wider civil society. Projects include Low2No and Helsinki Design Lab. T he latter is inspired by one of Sitra’s earliest investments. T his first event, known as the Industrial, Environmental, and Product Design Seminar, ran in 1968 on Helsinki’s island fortress of Suomenlinna, and was intended to address multidisciplinary problems, including what we would now call sustainability. T hose in attendance included Buckminster Fuller, Victor Papanek and Christopher Alexander, as well as an intriguing collision of Finnish designers (including Kaj Frank, Antti Nurmesniemi and Juhani Pallasmaa) engineers, industrialists and policy-makers. Design was a core component. Sitra’s SDU now continues this work, and is the platform upon which much of this essay is built.
— 14
2 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

3 For instance, the RSA publication, “You know more than you
think you do: Design as Resourcefulness & Self-reliance” (2009) by
Emily Campbell, suggests the following attributes: “Ready to
improvise and prototype, brave in the face of disorder and
complexity, holistic and people-centred in their approach to defining
problems, designers have a vital role to play today in making society
itself more resourceful.”
4
Even a Pritzker prize-winning architect such as Richard
Rogers cannot, for example, challenge the basic premises of the Barangaroo urban development in Sydney. T he combination of masterplan, financial model, political context, local history and local cultures created a tight frame within which the architectural design work must occur. Many of the architects and other designers within the project team knew that the way the question was being framed was fundamentally flawed, but from their relatively lowly position in the value chain of the built environment business, even the best in the world cannot interrogate the frame itself. T hey can only problem- solve within it. A middle-manager at the local property developer running the project probably has more agency, due to the positioning of design as problem-solving, as consultancy service, within an industry that is oriented towards the bottom-line, almost allergic to innovation, and seeing strictly limited value in the role of design. Under these conditions, a designer cannot address the question itself.
5
Former Deputy Minister across several departments of the
Canadian government, and Emeritus Professor of T he Canadian School of Public Service
6
Of course, some of it feels like the language of other cultures
too, such as scientific research and technological innovation, where Steven Johnson, for instance, also talks of things like the “slow hunch”.
— 14
3 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

7 Matthias Sauerbruch, of architects Sauerbruch Hutton, said
“(We) were trying to make buildings that could be applied elsewhere
as well. T hat’s partially the reason why the project is relatively
typological. It is trying to define certain types that are being applied
in this case, but could also be applied in Jätkäsaari or elsewhere.”
(quoted in Berthold and Kane, 2011)
8
T he developer SRV, a key client on Low2No along with Sitra
and VVO, has subsequently announced two new timber projects, one in the city of Tampere and another in Jätkäsaari.
9
T his focus on organisational context, amongst other things,
does not mean that the strategic designer becomes embroiled in the practice of large-scale “change management”, at least as it’s traditionally understood within corporations or public sector organisations. Change management is drawn from the toolkit and vocabulary of “human resources” and management consulting rather than design. T he latter ’s attention is on a deep understanding of people, habitat, culture, networks and systems, whilst constructing different ways of creating deep focus onto co-created productive outcomes, as well as addressing fundamental questions — it involves making things; it involves spatialising outcomes, or crafting products, or shaping and delivering services. T his sets it well apart from classic change management rhetoric, which often comes down to consultation without participation, advocacy without responsibility, restructuring the solution without reformulating the question, and producing intangible strategy without tangible outcome.
10
T he dialogue about design, and design research, is still
dominated by products, and their manufacturing and distribution processes. Read Dubberly’s fellow Apple alumnus Don Norman’s otherwise interesting and provocative critique of design research, including ethnography, and you’ll find it is really about the
— 14
4 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

relationship between technological innovation and products
(aeroplanes, mobile phones, computers, radio etc). T here is little
there about relationships, about soft infrastructure, about non-
technical systems, about the design of “conditions” within
communities and cultures.
11
T he analogy might stretch to the quarterback, for American
readers. And lest football feels a stretch in the first place, writer Jonathan Wilson has suggested football “is about shape and about space, about the intelligent deployment of players, and their movement within that deployment.”
12
For “professional”, do not necessarily read high-class
restaurants like Noma or El Bulli. T his could equally apply to a small mama-papa café in a dusty old town in Liguria, with rough-hewn bread dipped in freshly made pesto served on rough dishes in the shade of a lemon tree. T he point is that the quality of experience is enabled by years of practice in either case.
13
Indeed in June 2011 Nokia won a settlement against Apple in
a patent ruling related to this technology.
14 But equally, architecture in particular seems to get hung up
on traceability, perhaps reflecting its increasing insecurity, backed into a corner of diminished power amidst numerous other trades and with little actual power in business terms. T he trade’s concern with authorship has a long history, perhaps predicated on the elevated idea of the architect as “master builder” in the first place. Yet as buildings and spaces have become more complex, so the architect is one part of an increasingly diverse multidisciplinary team, almost a system in itself. Some architects are comfortable with the idea that their work is part of a wider system that leads to the realisation of a project (ultimately including the eventual users.) We needn’t solely look to a new generation for evidence of this — the great English architect
— 14
5 —
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Charles Holden (1875–1960) refused a knighthood twice, in 1943 and
1951, on the grounds that architecture was a collaborative effort.
Many have not been as gracious, humble or wise, however. Yet lack of
traceability is essentially only a challenge to the security of either the
consultancy model or a discipline, rather than anything more
meaningful. It doesn’t really matter in itself if architecture, say,
becomes less relevant — if the greater goals of architecture are being
addressed. Disciplines do not exist for the sake of it; they exist to
serve some higher function. If the system in question improves, then
traceability is only important as a learning criterion i.e. how did it
improve, and can we replicate those manoeuvres elsewhere?
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

TABLE OF CONTENTS
DARK MATTER AND TROJAN HORSES: A STRATEGIC
DESIGN VOCABULARY
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
WHAT IS THE QUESTION?
WHAT IS THE MATTER? WHAT IS THE META?
WHAT IS THE DARK MATTER?
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH DESIGN THINKING?
WHAT IS THE POINT?
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?
REFERENCES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT STRELKA
OTHER TITLES IN THIS SERIES
NOTES
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Minimum system requirements:
Adobe Reader XI or Adobe Digital Editions 4.5
for Windows, Mac OS, Android & iOS ; screen 10"
16+
Социально-политическое электронное издание
ХИЛЛ ДАН
ТЕМНАЯ МАТЕРИЯ И ТРОЯНСКИЕ КОНИ.
СЛОВАРЬ СТРАТЕГИЧЕСКОГО ДИЗАЙНА
На английском языке
Hill Dan
DARK MATTER AND TROJAN HORSES.
A STRATEGIC DESIGN VOCABULARY
Signed for use: 06.09.2017
Size: 10,0×12,5 cm
Font: Times New Roman
Publisher: Strelka Press
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design
119072, Moscow
Bersenevskaya naberezhnaya 14, build. 5а
Tel: +7 (495) 268 06 19
Email: [email protected]
www.strelkainstitute.com
This electronic version of the publication was prepared
by Intermediator Electronic Publications Agency
Website: http://www.intermediator.ru
Tel: (495) 587-74-81
Email: [email protected]
Copyright ОАО «ЦКБ «БИБКОМ» & ООО «Aгентство Kнига-Cервис»

Hill Dan - Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary.pdf

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows

Hill Dan - Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary.pdf

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 4

Slide 5

Slide 6

Slide 7

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 10

Slide 11

Slide 12

Slide 13

Slide 14

Slide 15

Slide 16

Slide 17

Slide 18

Slide 19

Slide 20

Slide 21

Slide 22

Slide 23

Slide 24

Slide 25

Slide 26

Slide 27

Slide 28

Slide 29

Slide 30

Slide 31

Slide 32

Slide 33

Slide 34

Slide 35

Slide 36

Slide 37

Slide 38

Slide 39

Slide 40

Slide 41

Slide 42

Slide 43

Slide 44

Slide 45

Slide 46

Slide 47

Slide 48

Slide 49

Slide 50

Slide 51

Slide 52

Slide 53

Slide 54

Slide 55

Slide 56

Slide 57

Slide 58

Slide 59

Slide 60

Slide 61

Slide 62

Slide 63

Slide 64

Slide 65

Slide 66

Slide 67

Slide 68

Slide 69

Slide 70

Slide 71

Slide 72

Slide 73

Slide 74

Slide 75

Slide 76

Slide 77