Societal Missions: Theory and Practice

This is a theme course of SPD theme 2: Strategic Design for Social and Sustainable Innovation.

To equipe yourself as future strategic designer working on societal missions, this course will provide you with a solid theoretical knowledge base on societal missions. By evaluating this theoretical knowledge you will better understand dynamics at work in social missions. To help you analyse these dynamics in reality, you will be confronted with practitioners working on societal missions. In this course you will dive into different theories on political and organizational dynamics in societal missions, different levels of power and relationships, theories on working with differences scales (micro/individual-meso/organization-macro/system level) and implementing missions on different time-frames (short and long-term).

You will learn from dialogues with practitioners working on societal missions, for example in, energy transitions, healthcare, and, a just society from different types of organizations. And you will analyse the practice in reality by having a conversation with practioners on their work. The course is individually assessed, however you can team up with peers to prepare your conversations together and observe each others' conversations. By doing so you develop a good understanding of what it means to work on societal missions as a strategic designer.