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.