Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: a Strategic Design Vocabulary

Thus, design must make clear that its remit is expanded from simply problem-solving to context-setting.

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.

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. The system has been designed in enormous detail, from a policy perspective, and often works like a

Buildings Learn (1994)

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (2010).

Social Animal (2011), David Brooks

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

Culture is not something that can be designed, after all; is it even ethical to consider that it could be

Who is the client for climate change, except perhaps the entire human race

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