This article explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can contribute to future scenario projection through the lens of Strategic Design, anticipating and mitigating future challenges in the context of transformations. It is argued that technological advances and the accumulation of data offer valuable tools for predicting future scenarios and planning strategic interventions. Through a systematic literature review, the study seeks to investigate the integration of Strategic Design with AI and Big Data as a proactive approach to dealing with extreme events such as natural disasters, health crises, and socio-environmental imbalances. The intersection between Artificial Intelligence technology and strategic design makes adopting more effective preventive measures possible, guaranteeing a more resilient and sustainable response to imminent challenges. The analysis reveals that while AI and Big Data provide advanced tools for analyzing and projecting future scenarios, interdisciplinary collaboration and Strategic Design are essential for translating these projections into concrete and effective actions. The study contributes to the literature by providing an in-depth understanding of how the synergy between technology, design, and risk management can facilitate overcoming social and environmental challenges. However, the importance of an informed and adaptable strategic outlook in the information age is reiterated.
Generative models in Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, are increasingly employed across diverse fields, including product design, for tasks like shape recognition and design creation. The convergence of physical and digital realms is emerging as a prominent trend in art and design. This trend underscores generative models' ability to bridge offline and online environments in creative endeavours. This article aims to investigate the potential of integrating generative image AI into a strategic design visualization process among product design students. Using image-based research analysis and semi-structured interviews, this study involved five product design students as respondents. The findings highlight that integrating generative AI tools, particularly the Copilot Bing Image Creator, significantly enhances product design education. It improves students' creativity and streamlines the design process. This integration not only closes the gap between creative concepts and practical applications but also offers a robust framework for evaluating AI-generated content. Ultimately, it enhances the quality, practicality, and comprehension of design processes among students. This study underscores the transformative potential of generative AI tools in strategic design process, showcasing their effectiveness in fostering creativity, efficiency, and design quality.
Assistive Technology (AT) orthoses pose socio-technical challenges, with high abandonment rates linked to poor aesthetics and conventional manufacturing limits. For users with motor impairment, specialized 3D scanning is often hindered by the critical technical barrier of maintaining limb position, restricting access to personalized design benefits. This study proposes a Strategic Design Framework centered on virtual limb repositioning, an intangible design artefact, to overcome this limitation. Showcased in a case study of a male teenager with spastic Cerebral Palsy, the methodology establishes an interdisciplinary-based approach where designer and occupational therapist collaboratively validate the limb’s final functional pose using Blender software. This collaborative process, aligned with co-design principles, reconfigures the AT development process to prioritize user agency and aesthetic personalization, demonstrating a viable proposal for systemic intervention for AT provision, advancing sociotechnical innovation through the strategic alignment of clinical expertise and design tools.
This research investigates the partnership between university-industry through sponsored projects within the scope of the Triple Helix Innovation Model. It is specifically anchored in intangible conditions of the model, identified in the existing literature on the subject. The objective is to discern best practices aimed at fostering innovation within the domain of industrial design education. Data was collected firstly through semi-structured interviews, complemented by participant observation and desk research for triangulation. The data were examined by thematic analysis with AtlasTI. The findings reveal key aspects of these partnerships, emphasizing the collaboration and teamwork, a market-oriented culture, involving real-world applicability, general feedback, and early technology access. The students’ skill development is also frequently mentioned. Certain aspects such as the involvement of civil society, which is more common in university-government partnerships, and intellectual property protection, appear to receive comparatively less attention in the partnership.
Service Design is an interdisciplinary approach that structures all aspects of a service—people, communication, and infrastructure—making it more useful, desirable, and effective for users and providers alike. This article explores how Service Design principles can be integrated into corporate architecture, focusing on creating user-centered workspaces. Through a literature review and a practical workshop conducted with employees at the XXXX, the study demonstrates how Service Design tools can contribute to corporate workspace design by fostering user engagement and improving workflow, communication, and spatial functionality. The findings suggest that incorporating Service Design early in the architectural process enriches the design outcome by aligning spatial design with organizational objectives, employee needs, and service quality improvements.
Design practice is inherently relational, shaped by encounters with diverse ways of knowing that influence how problems are defined, solutions envisioned, and legitimacy attributed. Conventional approaches to collaboration, often framed through coordination and consensus, prove insufficient when participants operate from fundamentally different epistemologies, risking the reproduction of hierarchies or the silencing of alternative knowledges. This article examines design’s potential as epistemic mediation, understood as a situated capacity to engage across difference without erasing it. Methodologically, it is grounded in a critical review of literature in design and anthropology, articulated with over two decades of professional practice in collaborative contexts and with the early theoretical foundations of ongoing doctoral research. The investigation is therefore conceptual and exploratory, aiming to provide a vocabulary for engaging with epistemic dimensions of design practice rather than reporting empirical findings. Its main contribution is the articulation of three analytical dynamics - Horizontal Epistemic Interfaces, Emergent Attention, and Contextual Amplification - which are proposed as conceptual orientations to reframe collaboration as a site of epistemic care, expanding design research’s capacity to foster more situated and plural forms of collective world-making.
The growing appreciation for products that express identity and individuality has driven the adoption of mass customization as a competitive strategy. This study analyzes its application in a handmade sneaker startup in Blumenau, Brazil, through action research adapted to the Kumar model and the Mass Customization and Personalization Effectiveness Index (MCPEI). The investigation mapped the process from initial contact to after-sales, incorporating artisanal techniques—such as hand painting, airbrushing, rhinestones, and recycled fabrics—and proposing organizational improvements. Results indicate productivity gains, reduced rework, and increased loyalty, linked to stronger brand identity and social media engagement. Theoretically, the study shows that classic mass customization frameworks can be adapted to small-scale, low-automation contexts, when supported by standardized processes, quality control, and active customer interaction. As a limitation, this is a single case study with predominantly qualitative data, and replication in other creative sectors is recommended. Findings reinforce that customization, beyond aesthetic differentiation, acts as a positioning and innovation strategy, fostering lasting emotional connections between consumers and brands. The study contributes to the Strategic Design field by framing mass customization as a strategic practice that links operational structuring with symbolic and experiential innovation.
As the cultural heritage sector intertwines with the computing industry and expands into the creative sector, the paper disseminates the preliminary findings of an applied industrial research project to contribute to the ongoing discussion on key challenges in Digital Cultural Heritage and outline potential future directions. RADICI is a two-year ERDF-funded project, aiming to develop an aggregating platform of digital cultural assets coming from diverse cultural and creative industries sectors, ensuring their interoperability to unlock new value co-creation. Stemming from a design-driven approach, RADICI aims to contribute to regional development by prototyping trans-sectoral value chains in matters of accessing, co-producing, experiencing, and leveraging Digital Cultural Heritage. This paper explores RADICI’s theoretical framework, rooted in a rhizomatic interplay of perspectives, and introduces Advanced Design as the framework driving its development. Particularly, it illustrated how trans-sectoral conversations were carefully designed to fuel co-creation sessions and foster collaboration among stakeholders from academia, business, GLAMs, and CCSIs. Data was collected through participant observations, workshop material, and post-event feedback. By conducting a thematic analysis, actionable insights were harvested and formulated according to a trans-sectoral lens, to inform further, rhizomatic developments of the project.
The shift from model-centric to data-centric artificial intelligence (AI) represents a paradigm change that demands active engagement from designers. Using a high-level literature review and the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) framework, this study identifies five key challenges designers face in AI development: aligning AI with user needs, leveraging small yet high-quality user data, uncovering nontrivial and meaningful patterns, refining AI models through iterative usability testing, and envisioning robust data pipelines. These challenges underscore the critical role of human input in mitigating blind spots in AI systems and fostering practical, human-centered solutions. The results emphasize the transformative potential of collaborative intelligence—an active learning process between human designers and AI systems. This approach bridges the gap between abstract computational processes and real-world applications, empowering designers to drive innovation while ensuring ethical accountability.
The research investigates the use of cultural references, with the choice of certain signs, in the creation of textile prints, intending to value cultures, identities, and territories, as well as in the search for original and creative results for surface design products, and can contribute to the rescue of collective memories, feelings of belonging and affection. To this end, a case study of two prints from the Amazon-themed collection O Coração é o Norte, from the fashion brand Farm Rio, is presented, analyzed from the model proposed by Joly and adapted by Santos. This model allowed a systematic investigation of the meanings of the constitutive elements of the prints, separated by the plastic, iconic, and linguistic axes, analyzed separately and then together, to find a synthesis, and finally, to analyze and confirm that the communication of the prints represents the Amazonian culture.
The capabilities of Design encompass, among others, the ability to organize, identify and solve problems, and the creative capacity to conceive and try new ideas to build more efficient future scenarios. Design for Sustainability has been discussed as a path to guide the societal transformations and Design for Social Innovation includes the communities in the center of the process. As these expanded scopes create systemic contexts of intervention, design engages in complex scenarios collaborating to co-designing a range of services. Such contexts pose Strategic Design as a key element to support connections with multiple actors which operate across collective solutions, sustained by operational methods and value co-production. The principal aim of this work is to present an approach of strategic design for transformative social innovation initiatives. As an exploratory and qualitative research, it adopted a combination of systematic and non-systematic literature review to interconnect themes and subjects. The main outcomes comprise the statement about the capacity of strategic design to operate as a boundary object, the role of research in relation to design and the potential of university as an open system.
The role of designers in the product development process (PDP) has become increasingly important. However, there is still insufficient empirical evidence regarding the actual engagement of designers in the PDP and their relationship with product development performance and market conditions. In this study, through quantitative surveys and analysis targeting Japanese manufacturing companies, we clarified how designers engage in each stage of the PDP and how their engagement is related to product development performance and market conditions. The analysis results revealed significant differences in how designers engage in the PDP between companies. Particularly, notable differences were observed in how designers contribute to screening and evaluation of product ideas, product concepts, and prototypes. Furthermore, it became evident that companies consistently engaging designers throughout the entire PDP achieve high design performance and market performance. On the other hand, in terms of development efficiency performance, consistent and high-degree designer engagement throughout the PDP was not shown to have a pronounced effect. Finally, the analysis results indicated that how designers engage in the PDP is closely related to design intensity rather than technological or competitive intensity in the market.
Systemic design has been noted as a promising scaffold to approach the emerging challenges faced by designers in understanding the dynamic and interconnected problems that define contemporary reality. The field can briefly be described as an attempt to integrate systems and design thinking with complexity and solution-oriented methods. While a range of literature on systemic design is available, its defining framework remains elusive and further development is needed to understand and investigate its viability. This article employs a systematic qualitative literature review in order to explore and synthesise existing systemic design mindsets, processes, and methods. The synthesis of frameworks acts to provide greater insight into the orchestration of applying systemic design to complex problems. It concludes by identifying potential challenges and limitations within the field. In particular, a limited investigation of consumer behaviour is present, with more focus given to material and production throughput.
The paper proposes to analyze the role of anticipatory practices in understanding the processes of technological evolution in defining innovation strategies within organizations. To support decision-making processes in technology innovation management, it has proposed that the rapid development of the innovation dynamics of the fourth industrial revolution could be framed through interpretive models such as the Hype Cycle. In order to guide the development processes within organizations, it is argued that it is necessary to further articulate such interpretative model through the development of design priority maps. Design priority maps are intended to assist in assessing the potential impact of technological innovations in complex environments influenced by multiple factors. Such design priority maps make use of emerging technology reports and analysis sheets accompanied by design fiction prototypes capable of enhancing evaluative capabilities to support decision makers and stakeholders. The paper specifically analyzes the potential and opportunities that the use of design fiction can bring within decision-making and research and development processes.
This article aims to review two fundamental concepts of the doctrine of corporate identity pioneer Wally Olins: the corporate brand as a "promise" and the effectiveness of brand architecture to make it visible. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Olins’ passing, we propose to vindicate the figure of one of the most influential theorists and practitioners in the field of organizational strategy and design. The paper investigates the concept of "promise" from a philosophical and anthropological perspective. Specifically, it takes as a framework of interpretation the philosophy inaugurated by José Ortega y Gasset and continued by Julián Marías for the understanding of human life and communities. The theory of brand architecture as a visual solution to imagine the structure and relationships of an organization is also reviewed. Finally, these concepts are verified based on a place branding case developed by the consulting firm Saffron for the City of Vienna. The analyzed case reveals the benefits of clarifying a common promise in the face of an identity problem, as well as the effectiveness of brand architecture to manifest it symbolically.
This article aims to present a methodology applied to new business development in the pre-incubation phase of Brazilian startups. The structure of this methodology has its origins in branding and design methods, with a hybrid, non-linear and co-creative approach. Based on this approach, the methodology was restructured, bringing the design process orientation for entrepreneurs to develop new businesses. Its application occurs through Cocreation laboratories, which apply pre-incubation processes for new classes of entrepreneurs every five months. In 2020, 19 units of pre-incubation laboratories were established - called Cocreation Labs - whose classes of entrepreneurs could evaluate their perception of the TXM Business methodology. The results of this analysis are presented in this article and show that there is a preference for the linear conduction of processes, that the methodological tools indicated were perceived as important contributors to business development, and that the methodology contributes to creativity especially in relation to the development of ideas and flexibility in exploring new possibilities.
Designing with other living organisms (biodesign) is reportedly different from designing with traditional materials such as glass and wood. This paper aims to present the development and testing of a framework for teaching and learning the biodesign process in an undergraduate context with limited resources. Limited resources meaning the lack of a studio space and a laboratory. This seems to be a research gap in the literature review. The methodological strategy to achieve the framework is Design Science Research. The framework is organized in two context spaces: the classroom and the student`s homes. Six are its elements: (1) Concepts, (2) Repertoire, (3) Project methodology, (4) Practice, (5) Management, and (6) Reflections. There are materialities to the framework, like a project journal and a grow-it-yourself kit – as well as activities, like brainwriting and tinkering. The framework was evaluated in an undergraduate Product Design program with no access to a laboratory and no proper studio space. Through triangulation, we found that 14 of the established learning objectives were considered as met and 7 were considered as partially met. We discuss the results with other biodesign practices in formal education. Future developments of the framework include the creation of an elective introductory biodesign course.
In response to the growing tension between business growth and sustainable consumption, strategic design management offers frameworks to facilitate the transition from linear to circular models. This article examines the multifaceted challenges and opportunities companies face when engaging in circular economy (CE) ecosystems. Specifically, the article addresses the question: How does agency shape collaborative dynamics in the initiation and maintenance of partnerships within the global coffee value chain during socio-technical transitions towards circular practices? Through stakeholder interviews and follow-up conversations with decision-makers, our analysis highlights how relational frictions—emerging from the entangled dynamics of human–more-than-human systems—serve as both challenges and opportunities in navigating CE ecosystems. Our findings indicate that these frictions reveal the interconnected and context-dependent nature of collaborative practices, shaping both conflicts and transformations. We contextualize these findings within design and innovation management approaches, emphasizing the need for evolving participatory modes that enable transformative collaborations and foster circular futures. Through stakeholder interviews and follow-up conversations with decision-makers, our analysis highlights how relational frictions—emerging from the entangled dynamics of human–more-than-human systems—serve as both challenges and opportunities in navigating CE ecosystems. Our findings indicate that these frictions reveal the interconnected and context-dependent nature of collaborative practices, shaping both conflicts and transformations. We contextualize these findings within design and innovation management approaches, emphasizing the need for evolving participatory modes that enable transformative collaborations and foster circular futures.
BioDiveIn and GoCOLife are two of several interventions developed within COlife studios over 2022 and 23. These aim to lead towards transition towards Post-Anthropocene, engaging ecological aesthetics. BioDiveIn intervention is an installation that offers multiple species habitats, edible landscapes and water pools for bats, swifts, small-size birds, squirrels, insects and plants. The intervention serves as a touch point that is - leading to DIY recipes to multiply the installation andto spot-a-bee application for joining the citizen science on pollinators. This was gamified in GoCOLife intervention. An urban game application that is engaging people in biodiversity support, and reproducing the DIY recipes, amongst others. The interventions were codesigned through gigamapping and full-scale prototyping through experimental Systems Oriented Design (SOD) studio courses in winter and summer with students, invited experts and other stakeholders. The design processes resulted in DIY events, a launch with a gardening party to accommodate the plants in the prototype and the urban game application GoCOLife.
A key aspect of service design practice is the utilization of diverse mapping methods to comprehend and depict service architectures. While a consensus exists regarding the importance of considering temporal experience as an aspect of service designing, the prevalent methods—customer journey maps, service blueprints, and system diagrams—fall short in capturing vital temporal dimensions. Contemporary tools spotlight physical touchpoints rather than address intricate narratives of more spontaneous customer/provider interactions. The task of documenting evolving temporal experiences necessitates a profound reorientation toward kairotic time, a dimension underrepresented in current discourse. This study explores alternative methodologies that elucidate time within the context of depicting evolving service experiences. Preliminary ventures into service design mapping attuned to temporality are also introduced.
