Strategic Design Studio

This is a SPD design studio.

In this course you will go through all the steps and challenges of a strategic design project, and practice key design capabilities essential for the development of your professional design skills. The course offers a holistic approach to strategic design practice, to prepare you with the knowledge and practical skills necessary for real-world strategic design challenges.

Essential elements of the course include understanding the internal and external context of an organisation, while integrating knowledge from multiple perspectives (strategy, organisation and innovation ecosystems, while balancing leadership and ethical considerations), to (re-)frame organisational challenges.

You will use collaborative and creative approaches to engage stakeholders, to explore solutions and interventions based on coherent design reasoning, using design leadership to scale the strategic impact of design. Visualisation and making skills will play a prominent role in this course, as you will learn and practice how to use expressive means (e.g., visualisation, prototyping or video making) to communicate your strategic skills in an engaging and collaborative dialogue with relevant stakeholders, and to give tangibility to your outcomes.

You will work on real assignments from different kinds of organisations (private, public, non-profit) and/or innovation ecosystems and focus on different kinds of challenges (commercial, societal, technology-related). The briefs you will receive range in different areas of strategic design going from identifying new market opportunities, developing new innovation approaches, investigating how the company can leverage their competences to proposing new visioning projects and disrupting existing organisational norms.

The study goals of this course will be assessed by:

- Assessment module 1 (pass/fail)

- Assessment module 2 (pass/fail)

- Assessment module 3 (pass/fail)

There will be three summative assessment moments (resulting in Pass, Fail or Fail with opportunity to compensate), at the end of each module. These summative assessment methods are supported by multiple formative assessment moments during the studio coaching. Moreover, Module 3 will also include two additional formative assessment methods: a midterm presentation for clients and coaches, and a student peer feedback moment.

The distribution between group and individual work across the three summative assessments is the following:

- Assessment module 1: group

- Assessment module 2: group

- Assessment module 3: individual and group

There is a stronger emphasis on group work, to reflect the nature of practice and definition of strategic design (co-formulation, co-implementation of SD). Nevertheless, you will have the opportunity to practice individual design skills during Module 3, where the initial phases of the design process are done individually, until the midterm presentation. The midterm moment includes two types of formative feedback: from coaches and clients during the presentation; and from student peer feedback. From this point onwards, students will choose a direction together from the individual contributions and continue working in teams for the remainder of the assignment of module 3.