Hill Dan - Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary.pdf

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ДАН ХИЛЛ
ТЕМНАЯ МАТЕРИЯ
И ТРОЯНСКИЕ КОНИ
СЛОВАРЬ СТРАТЕГИЧЕСКОГО ДИЗАЙНА
3-е издание (электронное)
Москва
«Стрелка Пресс»
2017

DAN HILL
DARK MATTER
AND TROJAN HORSES
A STRATEGIC DESIGN VOCABULARY
3-rd edition (electronic)
Moscow
Strelka Press
2017

УДК 72
ББК 85
H66
H66
Hill, Dan.
Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary = Тем-
ная материя и троянские кони. Словарь стратегического дизайна
[Электронный ресурс] / D. Hill. — 3-rd ed. (el.). — Electronic text
data (1 file pdf : 149 p.). — М. : Strelka Press, 2017. — System
requirements: Adobe Reader XI or Adobe Digital Editions 4.5 ;
screen 10".
ISBN 978-5-9903364-3-8
We live in an age of sticky problems, whether it’s climate change or the
decline of the welfare state. With conventional solutions failing, a new culture of
decision-making is called for. Strategic design is about applying the principles of
traditional design to «big picture» systemic challenges such as healthcare,
education and the environment. It redefines how problems are approached and
aims to deliver more resilient solutions. In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new
vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of
power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the
messy politics — the «dark matter» — taking place above the designer’s head.
And that may mean redesigning the organization that hires you.
УДК 72
ББК 85
The source print publication: Dark matter and trojan horses.A strategic
design vocabulary / D. Hill. — Moscow : Strelka Press, 2014. —
148 p. — ISBN 978-0-9929-1463-9.
ISBN 978-5-9903364-3-8 © Strelka Institute for Media,
Architecture and Design, 2014

This essay is written from a personal perspective, though my
colleagues at Sitra’s Strategic Design Unit — Bryan Boyer
, Justin W
Cook and Marco Steinberg — have been hugely influential in terms of
my thinking, and much of what follows is based on daily
conversations with them, as well as our projects. Numerous other
conversations with numerous other people, in and out of various
projects over the last 15 years, have also informed this essay. My
thanks to them too.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
BACKDROP
When I started writing this essay, Athens was burning again.
Muammar Gaddafi had been killed the day before. Occupy Wall Street
was in its sixth week of protest in downtown Manhattan, its
participants growing in number every day such that it has effectively
become a curious melange of a functioning shanty town with celebrity
endorsement and global media presence, in what is a private space,
Zuccotti Park.
The Occupy movement had spread worldwide, from small,
almost timid protests in my hometown of Helsinki, to violent
running battles with police on the streets of Rome. More than 950
cities took part in a coordinated global protest on 15 October 2011
across 82 countries, five months after the first Occupy protest in
Spain. Some 500,000 people took part in the 15 October protest in
Madrid alone (in Spain, almost half of all youth are unemployed).
Unified by the #occupy hashtag and the slogan “We are the 99%”,
the movement continues to grow.
A few months earlier, from 6 to 10 August 2011, many towns
and cities in the UK — mainly in London, Birmingham and
Manchester — suffered violent riots of a scale and ferocity that had
not been seen for a generation, if ever. While the UK was briefly
close to breakdown in the early 1980s, and had witnessed mass
protests and unrest many times before, the nature of the rioting,
looting and arson attacks in August was essentially unprecedented as
their cause was not clear.
— 6 —

Whereas the earlier poll tax riots and miners’ strikes, for
example, had a clear ideological disagreement at their heart, these
riots seemed to be about something else. But what, exactly? After the
recriminations and finger pointing, we are no closer to an answer.
Explanations offered veer between feckless nihilism, moral
breakdown and consumer culture, through to the belief that an entire
generation has been systematically disenfranchised and discarded by
30 years of neoliberal social and economic policy. Either way, the
cause was so deeply embedded, so fundamental, as to appear beyond
the core capacity of government itself.
This last year has also seen the Arab Spring unfolding across
north Africa, with Tunisia and Egypt undergoing revolutions, Libya in
civil war, civil uprisings in Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, and numerous
other countries and states witnessing major protests — Algeria, Iraq,
Jordan, Morocco and Oman among them.
In July 2011, the USA was hours away from “shutting down
government”, due to its own inability to agree on appropriate levels
of federal government spending. The episode is expected to be played
out again at the next opportunity.
Japan, the world’s third largest economy, careers from political
crisis to environmental disaster. The world’s-largest-economy-in-
waiting, China, despite a millennium of practiced statecraft behind it,
still faces an awkward developmental road ahead, pitted with the
inequality and social unrest familiar to previous episodes of mass
urbanisation.
When I finished writing this piece, Occupy Wall Street was still
occupying Wall Street, despite the slowly falling temperatures.
Similarly Occupy movements around the world were continuing to dig
in. Yet it was Oakland, California that was now burning, because of
the increasingly violent clashes between the Occupy Oakland
— 7 —

protesters and police, after a 3000-strong march had more or less
shut down the fifth busiest port in the US.
Two days before, the G20 summit had failed to strike any kind
of deal to resolve the eurozone debt crisis. The summit had been
described as a “make-or-break” moment.
It broke.
The same day, the UK thinktank Demos published research
indicating that the far-right was on the rise across Europe. The
Guardian reported “a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist
sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their
own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future
is focused on cultural identity.” The data was gathered before the
worsening of the eurozone debt crisis from September 2011. Were
these movements the counterpoint to Occupy, similarly poised to fill
the gaps emerging where mainstream political practice used to be?
As I write, up to 50,000 people are on the streets of Moscow
and around 50 other Russian cities, defying the cold and threat of
crackdown to protests against the prime minister Vladimir Putin,
amid allegations of election fraud.
George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, has just been
removed in favour of a new coalition government, after proposing a
referendum on new austerity measures and membership of the euro. In
his speech announcing the cancellation of the referendum, he said: “I
believe deeply in democracy.” The referendum was considered by
Europe’s leaders to be too dangerous to be deployed.
A few days later, Italy — where Silvio Berlusconi, the country’s
longest serving prime minister, had finally been forced out (not by
voters but by the markets) — joined Greece in being led by unelected
“technocrats”, in something of an implicit snub to democracy itself.
— 8 —

“The sidelining of elected politicians in the continent that
exported democracy to the world was, in its way, as
momentous a development as this week’s debt market
turmoil.” (Financial Times, 12 November 2011)
As the journalist Gillian Tett admitted: “The situation calls for
very firm, forward-looking action that is almost impossible in a
rowdy democratic political system at the moment.” (The Guardian,
11 November 2011)
When this sorry scene, too rowdy for democracy, is viewed in
comparison with the last decade’s rapid economic growth in emerging
economies, often with very different cultures of decision-making, the
sense of despair is somehow sharper.
CRISIS
Common to all of these stories — from violent, sometimes randomly
directed explosions of civil unrest to carefully targeted peaceful
protest — is this lack of faith in core systems. The systems in
question could not be more fundamental, encompassing the economic
foundations of western development to the particular structures of
governance and representation in all of the countries concerned, and
essentially democracy itself.
At its most visceral, we see this lack of faith manifested in
violence, and strikingly similar footage has been shot on the streets
of London, Athens, Cairo and New York. We must be careful to pick
apart the different drivers of each, yet we can also understand them
all as distrust, disbelief and dismay with existing systems.
In Athens, smoke from burning cars and litter bins mixes with
billowing shrouds of tear gas because of another austerity bill being
awkwardly manoeuvred through the Greek parliament. The riots
across England were triggered by the shooting of Mark Duggan in
— 9 —

Tottenham, north London, by the police, and exacerbated by similar
austerity measures to those in Greece. With the Arab Spring, the
drivers concern fundamental political models rather than economic
hardship as such, whereas the Occupy movement directly addresses
the core ideologies and practices underpinning a globalised economy.
Occupy is global in outlook, shifting positions subtly but still
expressing a lack of faith in a loosely defined “system”.
These protests, many of which are not violent, are not the
work of “a disconnected underclass”. The BBC’s economics editor,
Paul Mason, in his blog post “Twenty Reasons Why it’s Kicking Off
Everywhere”, described a new sociological type — “the graduate with
no future” — later going on to describe the “economic permafrost”
(apparently a phrase coined internally at HSBC) underpinning Occupy
Everywhere.
The International Labour Organisation’s report The World of
Work 2011 (based on Gallop World Poll Data 2011) finds significant
drops in “People reporting confidence in their national government,
2006 to 2010” in so-called advanced economies. Everywhere except
sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America saw a diminished confidence in
their national government with South Asia the most pronounced. The
presence of Asian countries, as the new fulcrum of global economic
activity, indicates that it is not easy to make a straightforward link
between lack of confidence and poor economic performance.
— 10 —

Equally, the report also finds significant increase in “Change in
risk of social unrest between 2006 and 2010” in advanced economies.
This data emerges before the various examples of unrest described
above. Again, everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and Latin
America saw an increase in the likelihood of social unrest, although
the increase was greatest in the advanced economies.
Less dramatically perhaps, we can also see a lack of faith across
the various incarnations of parliamentary democracy with weak or
coalition governments. At the time of writing, weak governments
exist across much of the world, either in the form of shaky coalitions,
small majorities or tenuous claims to power. In Europe, most states
are in coalition. Other major coalition governments elsewhere include
— 11 —

Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon,
Mali, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand and Zimbabwe. Moreover,
there are non-coalition governments in positions of relative weakness
in theoretically influential countries such as France, Australia, the
USA.
Across the various cultures represented above, decision-making
at the institutional level is proving particularly hard. This, the
practice of politics itself, is being directly challenged.
Before October’s emergency summit of all 27 European Union
nations to discuss solutions to the eurozone debt crisis, America and
China urged EU leaders to resolve the debt crisis and prevent the
world sliding into another slump.
This “slump” seems a little beyond something that might be
resolved in a weekend. It’s worth bearing in mind the scale of the
initial bailout in the US alone — estimated at $4.6 trillion in 2009-
10:
“That number is bigger than the cost of the Marshall Plan, the
Louisiana Purchase, the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis, the
Korean war
, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam
war and the total cost of Nasa including the moon landings,
all added together — repeat, added together (and yes, the old
figures are adjusted upwards for inflation).” (John Lanchester
,
2010)
That impossible macro-economic scale, just as with the other
big-picture indicators such as riots and revolutions, may merely be
proxies for deeper fissures emerging in the fabric of society. All of the
examples above are from this year alone, yet their roots are in the
complex tangle of issues that have emerged in the last few decades. In
the face of all this, many of our existing cultures of decision-making
seem to be cracking under the strain.
— 12 —

REALLY, REALLY WICKED PROBLEMS
Essentially, strategic design, the focus of this essay, is focused on the
systemic redesign of cultures of decision-making at the individual and
institutional levels, and particularly as applied to what we can think
of as the primary problems of the 21st century — healthcare,
education, social services, the broader notion of the welfare state,
climate change, sustainability and resilience, steady state economic
development, fiscal policy, income equality and poverty, social
mobility and equality, immigration and diversity, democratic
representation and so on.
The familiarity of this list does not mean that we know how to
deal with it. Each of these problems is a direct challenge to existing
methods, ideologies, practices and structures. There are no clients for
these problems. Who is the client for climate change, except perhaps
the entire human race? Clients purport to exist for many of these
problems; sometimes too many clients, even, which is a different kind
of problem.
But a systems-oriented view of problems challenges the idea
that healthcare, say, is the responsibility of a Department of Health.
Health is directly affected by urban planning, transportation and
other infrastructure, patterns of employment, food, education,
industrial policy, retail policy and so on, most of which will sit outside
of the neatly defined boundaries of one department.
The problems themselves are not neatly bounded or defined.
These are often known as “wicked problems’, after Horst Rittel and
Melvin Webber’s 1973 paper “Dilemmas in a General Theory of
Planning”. Here, scientific bases for confronting such problems,
which for Rittel and Webber is social policy, are bound to fail.
“There seems to be a growing realization that a weak strut in
the professional’s support system lies at the juncture where
— 13 —

goal-formulation, problem-definition and equity issues meet.”
(Rittel and Webber
, 1973)
If problem-definition was a problem then, it certainly is now.
Reading Rittel and Webber, it is sobering to reflect upon how little has
changed, or improved, despite them writing such a clear and
ultimately influential paper. These problems still need addressing in
new ways.
“It has become less apparent where problem centers lie, and
less apparent where and how we should intervene even if we do
happen to know what aims we seek … By now we are all
beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems
is that of defining problems … and of locating problems.”
(Rittel and Webber
, ibid)
WHAT KIND OF FAILURE?
It has become a cliché to point out that we have increasingly
globalised economies, moving with increased scale and pace, and
powered by rapid technological development. That this is a cliché
doesn’t alter its veracity, however, and as a result problem systems are
now entwined in almost impossibly complex, interdependent ways.
Addressing core problems is beyond simple policy or process
improvement at a local level.
The sociologist Saskia Sassen understands the Occupy
movements pitched in cities worldwide, or the protests in city squares
throughout the Arab Spring, as being knitted together with a new kind
of political fabric.
“The making of a globality constituted through very localized
issues, fought locally, often understood locally but which
recurred in all globalizing cities ... Today’s street struggles and
demonstrations have a similar capacity to transform specific
— 14 —

local grievances into a global political movement, no matter
the sharp differences in each of these societies. All these
struggles are about the profound social injustice in our
societies — whether in Egypt, Syria or the US and Spain.”
(Saskia Sassen, Domus, 2011)
The eurozone debt crisis, just as with the American sub-prime
mortgage crisis, are talked about as local problems, albeit continent-
wide, when they are ruptures in a globalised economic system. Their
failure is felt locally and globally.
“Just as we never consider the ground beneath our feet until
we trip, these glimpses into the complex webs of inter-
dependencies upon which modern life relies only come when
part of that web fails. When the failure is corrected, the drama
fades and all returns to normal. However
, it is that normal
which is most extraordinary of all. Our daily lives are
dependent upon the coherence of thousands of direct
interactions, which are themselves dependent upon trillions
more interactions between things, businesses, institutions and
individuals across the world.” (David Korowicz, 2011)
Korowicz’s point about failure is well made, but it becomes
visceral when experienced locally. During the Brisbane floods of
January 2011, despite a week of warning floods in the Queensland
area, systems for food, power, transport, and some drinking water, all
failed. Supermarket shelves emptied of fresh food, batteries and
candles within hours. Local electricity substations succumbed to
floodwater almost instantly, with no real distribution of energy
generation at a local level (despite a climate that is near-perfect for
solar generation). Essentially no agricultural capacity existed locally,
and so communities reliant on food being trucked in every day were
instantly without supplies, and with the roads underwater, no clear
— 15 —

idea about when trucks might return. In the heavily sprawling
suburban city typical of a rich western country, movement was
instantly curtailed as the Brisbane river swallowed up key arteries.
Overnight, Brisbane residents within a wide radius of the flood
zone were left with only a handful of people to talk to face-to-face,
with no way of communicating electronically, no new food to eat, no
power and no way of moving around. System failure occurred due to
the lack of resilience built into systems of everyday life. The gap
between policy and everyday life was suddenly very clear. The
sociologist Richard Sennett might describe this as a brittle city.
But this is a modern city, built essentially within the last
century, of at least 1.5m people in one of the wealthiest countries in
the world. Of course that wealth is another manifestation of a
globalised economy — Brisbane was rich on resource profits made by
shipping minerals to China and other developing economies.
Yet the Queensland-based food security expert Shane Heaton
has described how western cities such as Brisbane are only ever a few
days away from disaster in terms of food stocks.
There is a deep contradiction to such systems being so strong
that they can construct the modern world and yet so brittle that they
break within hours. This can, in part, be conceived of as a design
problem.
It’s tempting to look at how some other interconnected systems
have been designed to deal with failure. For example, the Information
and Communications Technology (ICT) concept of redundancy
essentially means over-scaling a system to enable back-up in the case
of failure ie having spare capacity on servers that are ready to boot
up at a moment’s notice. Yet a virtual enterprise, in which physical
matter comes into play only in scalable data-centre and sunk data
connections, is an easier system to make resilient than those
— 16 —

involving, say, logistics, energy transfer, water and so on. Matter
matters, in this respect.
It should be noted, however, that it is also possible to build
redundancy into physical systems. The architect Adrian Lahoud’s
notion of “post-traumatic urbanism” is useful here, derived from
cities such as Beirut where the availability of infrastructure and state
of its fabric can change daily. There, a form of”‘network redundancy”
exists through meeting everyday needs locally; everything — grocers,
hairdressers, bakers, tailors, builders — is replicated in each
neighbourhood, rather than centralised or aggregated into malls as a
so-called developed city might. It is a far more resilient system,
through reducing the risk associated with interdependency. Yet,
ironically, it is an approach to systems that has been “designed out”
of many contemporary cities. Sprawl is an outcome of active policy,
of design.
Interdependency is felt in a failure to deal with this physical
matter, rather than the wider context. As Korowicz also pointed out,
the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland led to “the
shut-down of three BMW production lines in Germany, the
cancellation of surgery in Dublin, job losses in Kenya, (and) air
passengers stranded worldwide.” The cost of the Brisbane floods was
estimated to be at least AUD$10 billion, but distributed right across
the continent.
But again, after the drama fades, these modern systems of living
snap back to the same non-resilient state they exhibited pre-failure.
In Brisbane, there was little talk of genuinely reconstructing the city
with a more resilient distribution pattern in mind; instead, the perhaps
natural, if nostalgic, first instinct was to rebuild what was there before.
After the 2008 credit crunch crisis in the USA, the writer Kurt
Andersen saw a similar opportunity presented at the scale of America:
— 17 —

“I see the gobsmacking crash and resulting flux as a rare
limited-time-only opportunity to significantly update and
reform the system and the habits of mind that are its cause and
effect. Thus we now have a chance to remake our medical and
energy and educational and urban planning systems along
vastly more sensible lines.” (Kurt Andersen, 2009)
That didn’t happen either.
There is good failure and bad failure. The former is failure that
enables a system to learn, becoming more resilient, more adept. The
latter is exhibited within a non-learning system. Are these non-
learning systems due to their fundamentally out-of-control
characteristics, systems whose complexity has grown beyond our
comprehension and capability? Or is it simply that policy is too
dislocated from its realisation?
This clear separation of policy and delivery appears to be a
particular facet of government in many developed countries. The UK
Cabinet Office has been undertaking a “Transforming Civil Service”
programme throughout 2011, and is actively trying to close this gap
between policy and delivery. The Institute for Government, a
Whitehall-based thinktank working with the Prime Minster’s Strategy
Unit on the “change programme”, has published papers talking
instead of civil servants as “systems stewards” who work within a
network in order to enable delivery and craft policy. (Whether the
civil servants in question have the capacity and motivation to
become “systems stewards” remains to be seen.)
Our public services have been designed, operated and measured
to within an inch of their lives. Every possible eventuality within a
system, such as healthcare or education, say, will have been considered
and catered for, at least in theory.
— 18 —

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 dream; and yet it
can also often produce appalling failure.
The IFG’s report “Making Policy Better” consistently
highlights the gap left by “realistic policy ambitions” followed by no
specification of “how they will be achieved in practice”. The authors
write that “the (policy) system as a whole leaves too much to chance,
personality and individual skill”. This is what we see around us every
day.
Yet everything around us is also the result of a choice, a design
decision in effect. So when we see failure, we can only assume a
breakdown between policy, the intended design, and delivery, the
outcome.
Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at
the University of Toronto, has written recently on the folly of
separating strategy from execution in the context of the business
world, countering the prevailing wisdom of the previous decade or so
in management theory.[1]
Yet the gap exists, and this means that failure is rarely learnt
from in any structured sense, as a way of garnering insight as to
necessary systemic change in order to build resilience.
But thanks to Occupy Everywhere and its ilk, there now seems
to be something else happening, some new level of tension and
conflict, a form of forced attention on to an ongoing problem of
complex interdependent systems failing, and the lack of faith that
runs alongside, beyond momentary crisis.
— 19 —

“When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from
Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street, it’s clear that something is
happening globally that needs defining. There are two unified
theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of
“The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of
“The Big Shift.” You decide.” (Thomas L Friedman, New York
Times)
But how to decide? We can’t possibly hope to uncover the right
solution, without first understanding what the problem actually is.
What is the question here?

WHAT IS THE QUESTION?
TRANSITIONS
Tellingly, Friedman didn’t define how the Great Disruption or the Big
Shift might move in a positive direction. We need a sense of how
transitions might not be violent ruptures, or in some cases a sad,
inexorable demise. We need to find a new approach to complex
interdependent problems, given that our primary institutions are
increasingly ill-fitted to doing so.
We need in particular to find courses of action to address
climate change, healthcare, social services, education, fiscal policy
and local economic development within a globalised economy. We
need to find a way of moving forward without certainty, without
prescribed courses of actions or existing best practice.
We need to find a way of addressing and building on the many
positive aspects of recent protests while fixing or removing the core
system faults that they are predicated upon. We may need to redesign
many of our existing models of public-service provision, but without
throwing the baby out with the bathwater and recognising the folly in
inadvertently returning (“recovering”) to the ideologies that got us
into this mess in the first place.
We need to find productive ways of articulating questions in
order to better understand the nature of the problems we now face, in
terms of the architecture of the problem.
Having suggested why we need to do this, this essay will now
focus on a few examples of how some of these challenges are being
tentatively explored, through strategic design.
— 21 —

I work at Sitra’s Strategic Design Unit (SDU) in Finland.[2]
Strategic design has a direction, over and above being a set of
tools, a vocabulary and a series of projects. Its focus is in enabling
systemic change through re-shaped cultures of public decision-making
at the individual and institutional levels, applied to the primary
problems of 21st-century governance.
This essay will not attempt to produce precise boundaries
around the notion of strategic design, however, or describe a coherent
and complete set of tools, techniques and tactics. It recognises that
design is a messy business, despite the clean lines of its coffee table
monographs. By making legible its seams as strategic design emerges,
we hope to better understand it ourselves, as well as open it up for
constructive critique and progression through as many useful dialogues
as possible. This essay is part of this process, testing out a new
language as much as anything. A vocabulary gives us a way of talking
about something, after all, and a more active discussion of
constructive possibilities may be what we need right now. Note that it
is not genuinely intended as a “playbook” to simply adopt, despite
the language, or a simple set of ideas and instructions to co-opt and
follow — legibility is simply intended to prompt thoughts and start
conversations.
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.
— 22 —

This vocabulary follows on from “the studio”, then, by starting
to concentrate on stewardship — the vital, messy reality of taking a
vision, transforming this into a strategy, and then making it happen
— in the context of public decision-making, as a new design
challenge.
But can the structures of the public sector and civic life, and the
content of the social contract, be seen as design challenges?
This could clearly be critiqued as more than a little arrogant and
hubristic. What gives designers the right to approach such complex
areas, usually the domain of political scientists and civil servants?
Aren’t these essentially beyond the capacity and capability — if not
remit — of design? Culture is not something that can be designed,
after all; is it even ethical to consider that it could be?
However, a different conception of design — one not overly
focused on problem-solving, or pretending to embark towards a
resolution with a clear idea of the answer — could provide one way of
addressing this concern, following an idea of prototyping and
heuristics in a space of “unknown-unknowns” (after Donald
Rumsfeld).
There may be something in the role of designer as outsider, too
— the naive position of not being a political scientist enables a
different perspective, which could have some value. Designers, often
used to working across different contexts from job-to-job, are used to
rapidly absorbing context and content, but also asking the unspoken
“obvious” questions to understand the architecture of the problem
from as many angles as possible. As Steven Johnson notes when
discussing research into innovation patterns in scientific research:
“Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few
preconceived ideas about what the ‘correct’ result was supposed to be,
— 23 —

allowed [outsiders] to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake
might actually be meaningful.”
It is of fundamental importance that strategic design gauges the
right mixture of ambition and humbleness at this point: ambition in
order to move into a space full of problems, inertia, legacy and
resistance, and yet underpinned by the notion that, as the industrial
designer Naoto Fukasawa has it, “design is a humble trade”, that this is
an area traditionally untouched by design, at least consciously, in
which designers have a lot to learn and a lot to prove. To be clear,
any successful strategy is likely to emerge from a multidisciplinary
perspective, in which design and designers play a part, no more.
Equally, however, we are motivated by the belief that the
current structures are themselves design decisions, no matter how
unconscious. And if it was designed in one way, it follows that it can
be designed in a different way. But it also seems clear that it would be
equally unethical, or at the very least irresponsible and negligent, to
stand on the sidelines while no coherent transition seems to be
emerging. The idea of public service itself, for instance, which is
variously under attack, is too important to let wither on the vine
because of poor management, inappropriate metrics, or the demise of
one particular funding model.
DESIGN IS A PROBLEM TOO
But there is one further problem to solve — design itself.
Design has been too wasteful for too long. Not in the sense that
it has often been focused on producing unnecessary or harmful
commodities or addressing problems that didn’t need solving, though
these are also true, but design has been wasteful in terms of its core
proposition, its essential mode. Design has too often been deployed at
— 24 —

the low value end of the product spectrum, putting the lipstick on the
pig.
In doing this, design has failed to make the case for its core
value, which is addressing genuinely meaningful, genuinely knotty
problems by convincingly articulating and delivering alternative ways
of being. Rethinking the pig altogether, rather than worrying about
the shade of lipstick it’s wearing.
Design may possess these characteristics — at least these
capabilities are well within its grasp — but its orientation and
direction has too often been elsewhere, and rarely addressed towards
the more meaningful contexts described above.
Among design disciplines, architecture can work in this mode,
clearly.
“Sometimes an architectural work can make these processes
palpable, or like a delicate servo-mechanism guiding a much
larger machine, it can modulate the larger system’s output in
such a way as to make its dynamic apprehensible.” (Sanford
Kwinter
, 2010)
This notion of the designed artefact guiding a much larger
machine sounds like a crisp definition of strategic design, as we will
see. But, as Kwinter suggests, if only one or two buildings a generation
can perform this act, one wonders what the other buildings are doing.
“The course and consequences of the present world economic
crisis are unpredictable. In a few months, the vast balloon of
expectations built on false assumptions about the world’s
resources was pricked. On balance, despite the difficulties and
hardship that must result, we can be thankful that the crisis has
exploded prematurely, for political reasons, while the world
still commands enough time and resources to effect the far-
reaching changes that are required to bring our demands on
— 25 —

nature into harmony with nature’s ability to satisfy them. One
consequence must be that the practice of architecture will have
to undergo a transformation, requiring a return to first
principles and the release of the latent skills and energies that
are now being misused or frustrated.” (Malcolm MacEwan,
Crisis in Architecture, 1974)
Although this reads like something written yesterday, it was
written in 1974. While MacEwan is to be congratulated for being
ahead of his time, albeit in another world economic crisis,
architecture should bow its head given that so little has moved on.
MacEwan’s essay discusses the idle resource depletion and energy
inefficiency involved in construction, the need for social mobility and
income equality, the need for the profession to better understand the
sources of human happiness, the exploitation of land value by
property developers and the complicity with which architects bow to
that business model, an obsession with growth, a public
disenchantment with architecture and architects and a loss of
confidence within the profession, the problems of architectural
representation derived from photographs of buildings without people
in them. It is immensely sad that so little of this has developed in the
subsequent decades.
Architecture is not alone in this misdirection, of course. Partly
because of the design thinking commercial bandwagon of the last
decade, and partly because of some more meaningful interventions,
such as the Royal Society of Arts Design and Society programme[3]
, the idea that design can play a wider role can almost be read as
an implicit critique that it has been cooling its heels for too long,
standing on the sidelines of core questions, rarely addressing more
fundamental structural problems.
— 26 —

Yet most of these interventions, as good as they are, do not
suggest a repositioning of design at a deeper level within the
architecture of society; say, embedded within government as a
genuinely strategic capability.
Actually, design is usually deployed as problem-solving within a
defined space, as process-improvement within a bounded system, or
new product development within a market.
Design is usually applied to problems that are either, in
Rumsfeldian terms, known-knowns or known-unknowns. The creative
city, the sustainable development, the usable interface, the clearer
taxation form, the appealing magazine layout, the energy efficient
building, the seductive car, the recyclable toothbrush — most of these
fall into those categories of knowns. There are either well-known
technical solutions, and the real problem may be a lack of
commitment, funding, skill, or motivation, or they are at least clearly
defined problem spaces, that process improvement, nuanced analysis,
elbow grease and the odd bit of luck could easily solve. Design’s value
is often couched in terms of problem solving in these environments.
Yet although it can solve problems, design should be about much
more than this. Indeed, the problem-solving ability is perhaps the
least important aspect, coming as it does at the end of a potentially
more valuable exploratory process or approach.
Nor is problem solving unique to designers. As the designer Jack
Schulze, principal at the design consultancy BERG, has pointed out,
dentists solve problems too. Schulze prefers instead to think of design
as “cultural invention”, a phrase with a lot more leeway and agency.
It suggests a much wider remit in terms of uncovering, shaping and
conveying alternate trajectories.
This is partly inflected through an understanding of
contemporary design in the context of the internet — “the internet
— 27 —

of things”, as well as “the internet of things that are not things as
such” — wherein cultural or symbolic value can be hosted in almost
anything.
Yet the idea predates the internet. Norman Potter presented a
wry classification of designers in his seminal What Is A Designer
(1969), which included the designer as “culture generator” (the others
are “impresarios”, “culture diffusers”, “assistants” and “parasites”).
Equally, designers seem to be exploring different business
models, including cultural production, rather than simply service
provision to clients. (BERG is a good example, actually, with a range
of products, services and platforms originated in-house, as well as
client-facing work.)
Yet too often, the stance of the designer is oriented almost
solely towards problem-solving. Too often, that’s what they’re
trained for. The issue here is something rarely considered at school:
what do you do when you realise you are addressing the wrong
problem, your bounded remit having been the outcome of the wrong
question in the first place? This happens frequently in design work in
practice, and yet stuck at the wrong end of the value-chain, simply
problem-solving, it is difficult to interrogate or alter the original
question. You simply have to solve within the brief you’ve been set;
you can’t challenge its premise. Just try harder.
As it turns out, you can’t solve that problem[4]
. (It must be noted that much in the designer’s unhelpful
positioning here is self-inflicted, through their own inability or lack
of desire to address more meaningful aspects of the problem.)
Amid the “white heat of technology” phase of mid-1960s
Britain, and as a believer in the promise of many of the technologies
that the British prime minister Harold Wilson was referring to, the
— 28 —

architect Cedric Price said: “Technology is the answer. But what is the
question?”
He was right to, well, ask the question.
Thus, design must make clear that its remit is expanded from
simply problem-solving to context-setting. The limited impact of
focusing solely on the “lipstick on the pig end” of the “value chain”
— the product, the service, the artefact — must be expanded on by
addressing all aspects of this chain, and perhaps most importantly the
strategic context of the chain itself.
In other words, the question.
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.
“When something goes wrong, it can usually be traced back to
the beginning, from the acceptance of false premises. Hence
on the one hand the importance of questions, and on the
other
, of the resourcefulness of attitude that prompts them.”
(Norman Potter
, 1969)
In terms of practice, design’s core value is in rapidly
synthesising disparate bodies of knowledge in order to articulate,
prototype and develop alternative trajectories.
But if these are simply deployed to apply lipstick to pigs, it’s a
waste of time. So much of architecture and design is wasteful.
Strategic design is also, then, an attempt to reorient design to the
more meaningful problems outlined in the introduction. A force
should have a direction and a magnitude, after all.
A DESIGN CHALLENGE
— 29 —

This direction is towards the unknown-unknowns, the problems
suggested above, the problems lying somewhere behind these various
indicators of unease and unrest, the problems that existing approaches
cannot handle.
Sitra’s Marco Steinberg says we have ended up with18th-century
institutions, underpinned by philosophies and cultures of a similar
vintage, now facing 21st-century problems. The distinguished
Canadian public servant Jocelyne Bourgon[5]
pins the date considerably later, but reinforces the essence of the
statement:
“Many of our public institutions and public organizations were
born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They retain
some fundamental characteristics from that era … Preparing
government for the challenges of the 21st century requires
viewing the role of government through a different lens than
the one inherited from the industrial age.” (Jocelyne Bourgon,
2011)
The primary institutions of academy, government, hospital,
corporation, and even our trade relations perhaps, in play across most
of the developed world at least, are post-Enlightenment and Industrial
Age formations and not designed to deal with these new problems of a
very different nature. The social contract, defining an individual’s
relationship with government, was written for another time.
So if the traditional tools of governance, policy, and scientific
knowledge no longer work, what do we do? How do we know what to
do when it is not clear how to even discuss the problem? This is not
something you can write a traditional brief for.
The collapse of knowledge, of authority, of institution can leave
a dizzying sensation, a kind of vertiginous drop into an abyss of
uncertainty. We might suddenly empathise with, as the old adage goes,
— 30 —

the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat. That isn’t
there.
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. This is what you do when you don’t
know, yet still have to take action.
The sociologist Bruno Latour sees the lack of certainty and
“fact” in political representation as a clearer, and perhaps overdue,
recognition of how actually things are:
“We are asking from representation something it cannot
possibly give, namely representation without any re-
presentation, without any provisional assertions, without any
imperfect proof, without any opaque layers of translations,
transmissions, betrayals, without any complicated machinery
of assembly, delegation, proof, argumentation, negotiation,
and conclusion.” (Latour and Weibel, 2005)
Some of this “machinery” feels like the language of design: of
contingency and compromise, of hunch and sketch[6]
. This is an heuristic, an improvisation, a prototype from which
one learns a course of action, rather than having a preconceived idea
of a solution. It recognises, perhaps, that the strategic act is in
knowing how to capitalise on the sketch, to explore through
prototyping.
But this more exploratory mode is also a different kind of
design. Much existing design practice falls neatly within an analytical
context of problem-solving, broadly speaking, yet the idea that
policy and governance can be convincing through mere presentation
of fact supported by clear analysis is also being directly challenged.
In-depth analytical approaches can no longer stretch across these
— 31 —

interconnected and bound-less problems, where synthesis is perhaps
more relevant than analysis.
“The problem is that transparent, unmediated, undisputable
facts have recently become rarer and rarer
. To provide
complete undisputable proof has become a rather messy,
pesky, risky business.“ (Latour and Weibel, 2005)
Design produces proof, yet as “cultural invention” it is also
comfortable with ambiguity, subjectivity and the qualitative as much
as the quantitative. Design is also oriented towards a course of action
— it researches and produces systems that can learn from failure, but
always with intent. In strategic design, synthesis suggests resolving
into a course of action, whereas analysis suggests a presentation of
data. Analysis tells you how things are, at least in theory, whereas
synthesis suggests how things could be.
Our systems of governance still lend more weight to analysis
than more qualitative synthesis. Yet the more we learn about the
science of the brain, the less appropriate this seems. In The Social
Animal (2011), David Brooks suggests the persistent failure of policy-
making is because of this preference for rational analysis and
simplistic quantitative metrics, despite the evidence that “we are not
primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily
the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness”.
“The failures have been marked by a single feature: Reliance
on an overly simplistic view of human nature. Many of these
policies were based on the shallow social-science model of
human behavior
. Many of the policies were proposed by wonks
who are comfortable only with traits and correlations that can
be measured and quantified. They were passed through
legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about
the deep wellsprings of human action as they are of speaking
— 32 —

in ancient Aramaic. They were executed by officials that have
only the most superficial grasp of what is immovable and bent
about human beings. So of course they failed. And they will
continue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true
makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public
policy.” (David Brooks, 2011)
(It’s an intriguing thought to stop and consider how we might
better create our cultures of decision-making that take into account
the emerging findings of neuroscientists about how humans preference
short-term decision-making. Given our need to make long-term
decisions — around climate change, healthcare, demographics —
should we design systems that deliberately mitigate against, and
compensate for, how we are wired for short-termism?)
Tristram Carfrae, one of the key leaders at the global
multidisciplinary design and engineering firm Arup, has suggested the
firm’s greatest challenge lies in the shift from analysis to synthesis,
recognising how different this mindset is for the traditionally trained
engineer. Synthesis is quite different to the apparently objective
approach of the analyst or engineer, or that of management
consultant; again, not least as it requires judgement in order to decide
what to do, as synthesis produces.
“To an ability for sorting, ordering, and relating information
he must bring qualities of judgement and discrimination as
well as a lively imagination. There is a diffuse sense in which
the seemingly ‘objective’procedures of problem analysis are in
practice discretionary, embedded as they are in a whole matrix
of professional judgement in which relevant decisions are
conceived.” (Norman Potter
, 1969)
While other consultant practices have other attributes, this
ability to produce, to do, as a way of generating insight, of enacting
— 33 —

and reorienting strategic intent, is a key differentiator to design in
this context.
“Through the action of designing we come to know the world
in ways that we did not know it prior to designing. What is
critical in design research is that the observing is intrinsically
tied to designing. Without the designing happening there can
be no meaningful observation.” (Richard Blythe)
This emphasis may be cautiously welcomed in itself, given the
near-paralysis involved in decision-making described earlier. Indeed,
reactions to the Helsinki Design Lab Studio Model from policymakers
have been extremely positive, noting in particular the shift in the
tone of conversations.
So we have new kinds of problems, but potentially new kinds of
design to address them. How might we begin to understand the value
of strategic design? What kind of techniques, approaches and
structures might get traction with these new design challenges?

WHAT IS THE MATTER? WHAT IS THE
META?
CASE #1: THE EDGE — FROM MATTER TO META AND BACK
Strategic design attempts to draw a wider net around an area of
activity or a problem, encompassing the questions and the solutions
and all points in between; design involves moving freely within this
space, testing its boundaries in order to deliver definition of, and
insight into, the question as much as the solution, the context as
much as the artefact, service or product.
Call the context “the meta” and call the artefact “the matter”.
Strategic design work swings from the meta to the matter and back
again, oscillating between these two states in order to recalibrate each
in response to the other.
“A case study: project work at the State Library of Queensland
in Brisbane. Initially, Arup pitched a ‘post-occupancy evaluation’ of
the library’s popular wi-fi service. This ultimately involved several
days on-site, observing, interviewing, filming and photographing, as
well as building 3D models of wi-fi signal strength in order to
understand its relationship to physical space. This largely matter-
based work then progressed to meta-based work over the course of
three years, ultimately becoming embroiled in the strategic direction
of the library itself.”
The wi-fi service was extraordinarily popular; it was effectively
in-use 23 hours out of 24 every day, thanks to the largely open
ground floor designed by Donovan Hill architects and Brisbane’s sub-
tropical climate. Visitor numbers had rocketed since the renovation,
— 35 —

and the research indicated that wi-fi was responsible for a large part of
this increase. The wi-fi had transformed the use of public space in and
around the library, and was transforming the function and character of
the library itself.
In documenting this ethnography-lite, and in conversation with
the client, it became clear that the library needed a strategic context
in which to understand the wi-fi service. Despite its popularity, many
staff could not connect the service with the library’s existing strategy,
or indeed their preconceived ideas about what a library was, what it
was for.
So the work developed a strategic edge to accompany the
practical suggestions about outdoor power sockets, amenities for late-
night users, signage and visibility and so on. This strategic side delved
into the function of libraries in the 21st century, as well as the
possibilities for this particular library on the south bank of the
Brisbane river, in terms of its immediate physical and organisational
context.
A key focus was on how the particular service — the wi-fi —
might scale across the city in terms of coverage, but also how the new
applications and functions that wireless networks enable could be
fruitfully incorporated into the idea of what a library was, and thus
reinforce the idea of libraries in the first place. In effect, this meant
building on the particulars of the existing wi-fi service to deliver wider
strategic change across a number of dimensions.
This in turn led to further work, as the same client needed to
deliver a new “digital culture centre for young people” further along
the same riverbank. Involving a retrofit of an early-80s building by
the architect Robin Gibson, The Edge project was essentially without
coherent strategy and yet was halfway through the architectural
— 36 —

design process, having selected the Brisbane architects m3 and several
sub-consultants.
So the project for The Edge rapidly retrofitted a strategy for
the organisation and the building. This included the vision for The
Edge, expressed through a variety of strategic artefacts, as well as
work explaining what a “digital culture centre” might be — and indeed
what “young people” might be. It also included the ICT strategy, the
approaches to audio-visual equipment, the definition of various
productive spaces internally, including the naming of the various labs,
the design of the pods along the window, the web services and social
media activity, whether there was a coffee bar, what kind of coffee it
should serve, whether the staff should wear uniforms, the organisation
structure, job titles, artist-in-residence formats, interim brand
identities, the selection of magazines and other periodicals for the
informal library/kiosk space, the approach to sponsorship
opportunities, the design of modular furniture systems, wayfinding
options, operational criteria for media façades and so on.
Along with my colleagues Marcus Westbury and Seb Chan, we
called this compendium of minutiae and overview the “operating
system” for the building. The use of such terminology implied a
construct for moving backwards and forwards seamlessly between the
detail of a particular instruction and the operational framework
within which it sits, between data and metadata, almost. This work
was zooming from matter to meta and back again constantly. It
meant being close to the detail of the architecture and engineering —
discussing the strategy for a handrail, or curtain, or a slice through
concrete — as well as designing the context within which the building
sits: the organisation and its intentions, operations, its business
model. Without rigorous definition of exactly the right artefacts,
products and services, couched in exactly the right way, the project
— 37 —

would have failed in a core objective: to appeal to young people on
their own terms; to be “authentic” and compelling in a way that a
government usually isn’t. But the same rigour was used to shape the
organisation.
At this point, it becomes clear that the meta — the
organisational vision and strategy — is being richly informed by the
detail of work conducted at the matter level.
Finally, almost a year after the successful opening of The Edge,
this same client required a foresight-oriented piece of work describing
the likely challenges and opportunities facing public libraries over the
next decade. This was pure meta-work, in essence, disconnected from
any particular building project. Yet the detailed insight gathered from
the previous projects informed the sense of possibility for the
organisation — what would the client countenance? What could this
particular organisational culture handle?
Equally, the contextual research conducted for the matter-based
work had located networks, resources and case studies that would
inform the foresight project, and help extrapolate accurately and
imaginatively from what the current library was capable of doing. It
would define possible trajectories that would stretch the client, but
with a realistic and manageable sense of ambition drawn from being
able to locate their interests and capacities relatively accurately.
Without the rigour and robustness required to deliver a building
— The Edge — the foresight and strategy work would have been light
at best. Without the wider insight garnered from strategic vision work,
and access to the clients and stakeholders at that level, the details of
the building project and architecture would not have been as well-
tuned.
With this project, as with any project that tries to break a
mould, it’s clear that the context had to be designed, as well as the
— 38 —

built outcome. Here, the context means a new organisation (The
Edge), the existing host organisation (the State Library) and stopping
off at almost every node in the network of relationships emerging
from the project.
This basic idea, zooming back and forth from matter to meta,
and using each scale to refine the other, is core to strategic design.
There are several emerging ideas — again, a vocabulary as much as
anything — that we can use to organise our approaches to this idea.
They are described as “plays”, as in a football playbook, to suggest
they might be adopted and altered, and deployed elsewhere.
PLAY #1: THE MACGUFFIN
With this idea of designing the context as well as the artefact, in a
form of strategic symbiosis, what kind of outcomes might actually
emerge, and how might they be organised?
Our core case study here is the Low2No mixed-use development
in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki (the name comes from moving from “low
carbon to no carbon”) and one of our core tactics is the MacGuffin.
The MacGuffin comes with a particular provenance. The phrase
is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, and has become associated with him
ever since. The dictionary defines it as “an object, event, or character
in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion
despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.”
And in Hitchcock’s words:
“A MacGuffin you see in most films about spies. It’s the thing
that the spies are after. In the days of Rudyard Kipling, it would be the
plans of the fort on the Khyber Pass. It would be the plans of an
airplane engine, and the plans of an atom bomb, anything you like.
It’s always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry
— 39 —

about but the audience don’t care… It is the mechanical element that
usually crops up in any story.”
According to the British Film Institute’s Mark Duguid, the
MacGuffin, is “the engine that sets the story in motion”. In
Notorious, it’s uranium ore hidden in wine bottles. In North by
Northwest, it’s the entirely vague “government secrets”. There is a
long history to the idea of the plot element that kick-starts and
drives the narrative but is somewhat inconsequential in the end. More
obviously, the golden fleece is what drove Jason and his Argonauts
through multiple narrative scenarios in Greek mythology. More
recently, the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a good
example.
Low2No uses the MacGuffin of a low-carbon building project. It
is a mixed-use city block comprising around 150 apartments and
commercial space, such as office space, incubator spaces for start-ups,
food and other retail spaces, connected through shared public spaces
and services. While at face value, Low2No looks like a modern block
project, it actually carries with it a host of innovations, which are not
immediately obvious.
For example, Low2No is designed to be a largely wooden
building, of some scale (around 11-12 storeys in places). This is partly
as timber is such a strong contender for a low-carbon building
material, given the way it “locks up”, or sequesters, carbon, as
compared with the more carbon-intensive concrete and steel.
This is now possible because of the existence of cross-laminate
timber as a building technology, which is fire-safe and structurally
sound. And this is preferable as Finland has a vast and mature forestry
and timber industry, which is nonetheless threatened by cheaper,
faster timber production from developing economies nearer the
equator.
— 40 —

If it can compensate for this potential loss of paper and pulp
processing, its traditional business, via timber as construction
material, the Finnish forestry industry has a new trajectory to
explore.
In order to enable the use of timber in the building, the project
had to change the fire codes within Helsinki. These were a legacy
from the 19th century, when timber buildings burnt with regularity,
and hadn’t been updated in this respect since.
Again, the building project acts as a MacGuffin, in that it drives
the plot with enough momentum to ensure that fire codes are actually
changed; it provided enough of a gravitational pull of importance that
it gave the relevant actors the motivation to reach into the policy
apparatus and alter the codes.
So timber is a building material, but also a strategic outcome. In
itself, at Jätkäsaari, it is literally a design detail, a construction choice,
but with these external outcomes in mind, this detail is connected to
strategic impact well beyond the physical reality of the particular
building.
When viewed in these wider strategic contexts, the entire
building itself is a mere detail, a distraction almost, which simply
carries the other projects, gives them a reason to exist, lends an
excuse to develop them — and the ordeals of a construction project
provide the necessary rigour to develop them well. It feels frivolous
to say that a building costing millions of euros is but a mere detail, but
in a sense it is.
Despite that, however, the artefact is also essential. In the case
of Low2No, the building is a platform for a wider series of strategies,
all of which are harnessed through the gravitational pull of the
building itself.
— 41 —

These strategies could not exist without the building. It’s easy to
get work as a consultant to pitch ideas — “Have you thought of doing
a timber building? That would be great!”; “How about doing some of
that smart city stuff? It looks like this, wouldn’t it be nice?”
The idea is not enough. In fact, the idea is the easy bit. Yet
while it’s easy to put a PowerPoint together pointing out the virtues
of timber construction, it doesn’t actually make it happen. Without
the excuse of the building project, it’s unlikely the building codes
would have been rewritten in the near future.
And for timber in this case, read many other potential
innovations. For example, something similar has occurred with
“smart city” technologies and services, which companies such as
IBM, Cisco, General Electric and others have spent millions on
promoting, with little return so far. It’s not that it’s a bad idea; it’s
just there is not enough motivation to make it happen. It’s missing a
MacGuffin.
The problem is in taking clear design intent — the stage where
“smart city” concepts are rife — into development, procurement and
commissioning, and emerging from the other side with the intent
intact, perhaps even improved by the process, such that further
strategic outcomes can be realised.
The MacGuffin helps drive this process through its gravitational
pull, through its requirement for rigour. It gets the ideas out of
PowerPoint and into the “meta” of context, into redesigning the
organisational, policy or regulatory environment in order to get
things done. Legislation and policy is the “code” that enables
replication elsewhere.
When the conversation is abstract, as it often is in strategic
work or the realm of “good ideas”, it is difficult to resolve. By
building something we pull conversation towards consensus. We have
— 42 —

to agree in order to build; the physical reality of something pulls
discourse into a more meaningful, more tangible territory. So the
motivation provided by the MacGuffin in question can be allied to
realising strategies with rigour, in detail.
There is a clear tension with this approach to strategic design
work; without the proxy of the building project, these wider strategies
would not pull focus or resonate, and often end up as the policy
equivalent of vapourware. They remain abstract, and easy to ignore.
Yet the project can pull focus so much, it is sometimes difficult
to keep the wider strategic outcomes on the table. Construction, for
example, has a habit of dissolving innovation on sight, so while the
focus pull of the physical matter is important and useful, it can also
quickly eradicate strategic aspects or innovation agenda. Low2No has,
on occasion, suffered in this respect.
Lose track of a building project by focusing on the strategic
layer too much, and nothing gets realised. Focus pull on the building
layer and all you have is that: a building, with no strategic impact. So
the MacGuffin is to be chosen and handled carefully. This is the
practice of design stewardship.
To extend the metaphor of a MacGuffin, the audience (eg the
users of Low2No) are unlikely to care about the building project as
such; whereas the characters (the clients, the designers, the planners)
are focused on it to the exclusion of almost everything else.
The building’s residents, visitors, workers, shoppers, etc are
rarely interested in a building’s intrinsic architectural or engineering
qualities. They are interested in what it can do for them, what new
patterns of living and working supports and enables. They are rarely
interested in the details of timber as building material, which is a key
focal point of the construction phase, but may well be interested to
— 43 —

know that a primary Finnish industry may have a new trajectory that
continues to enable wealth creation.
And yet the MacGuffin as building is also useful as it gives
audience something they can easily understand, something that they
can grasp on to, even if the idea of building is then expanded a little.
Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and The
Talented Mr Ripley, noted that an audience’s credulousness and
goodwill can be stretched quite a bit in this way, though not
indefinitely.
Equally, a wider audience might be influenced by the possibilities
within Low2No. These elements are transferable in a way that the
physical experience of Low2No as building can only occur on a few
hundred metres square of currently windswept Jätkäsaari.
So this influence on audience is well beyond the influence of the
building as architecture, which can only really meaningfully exist
within the world of architectural practice and architectural criticism.
So from the point of view of the wider Low2No project, and
compared with the replicable strategies that might ripple across
Finland, and beyond, the building is a mere detail. It is a classic
MacGuffin; not especially relevant in itself, but the entire plot cannot
exist without it. It is the reason for the entire story, and yet beside
the point. The wider story is ultimately more interesting, more
affecting.
Each strategic design project might ask: what is the MacGuffin
here? What is the plot device that will drive the picture? What is the
artefact that will motivate the various actors to create a richly
rewarding experience for the audience, and enable strategic outcomes
by also addressing the context?
PLAY #2: THE TROJAN HORSE
— 44 —

A second variation on the idea of the strategic vehicle is the Trojan
Horse. This aspect of the project also uses an artefact as the hook for
a series of other activities, though its role is in suggesting that an
artefact can contain multiple strategic elements.
The MacGuffin is a simple artefact that provides motivation;
the Trojan Horse is an artefact that carries “hidden” strategic
elements.
So Low2No is a building, yes, but it contains
• a platform for exploring how to use procurement more
creatively
• how to rethink food culture in Finland in terms of food retail
and food production that emphasise local, organic and sustainable
approaches including urban agriculture
• how to provide new futures for the Finnish timber industry
• how to develop new ownership and tenancy models
• explore carbon accounting
• develop new forms of innovation environment
• build communal facilities such as shared sauna which reverse
trends towards privatised sauna,
• how to introduce the built environment industry to
participatory design processes,
• how to prototype informatics-led “smart city” behaviour
change amongst residents, workers and visitors,
• how to enable organisational change within the client
organisations, and so on.
• Each strategy is designed to be replicable elsewhere.
Although this particular language wasn’t used at the time,
Low2No was conceived with these principles in mind from the start.
The project is about systemic change, first and foremost, with the
building as an enabler of such change, rather than the end in itself.
— 45 —

This approach is evident even in the competition and procurement
process, which was designed to foreground replicable approaches and a
team capable of producing a diverse range of strategies, rather than a
particular proposal for a particular building. The competition was not
about drawings, renderings, built outcomes — but about designing an
approach, a strategy.
This is highly unusual in the world of architectural
competitions, which tend to favour the image of a physical proposal
over any deeper understandings of what a building can be, strategic or
not. This is sometimes inadvertent, but is often a simple tactic to
generate capital — financial, cultural and political — through
imagery, and tacitly supported by an architectural media hungry for
the latest renders.
Low2No’s competition was instead designed to emphasise long-
term systemic change for Finland, particularly around the shift to a
low-carbon country. As Sitra’s Director of Strategic Design, Marco
Steinberg, said at the time: “We are not interested in your solution,
we are interested in the mindset you bring.”
Yet, again, this meant simultaneously working in two modes:
dealing with the strategic, while working on the particular. Steinberg
said of the competition framework:
“If we had done a standard architecture competition people
would have all known what the expectations were. We
struggled with how to keep a balance between developing a
big picture perspective and yet not disconnecting from the
architecture. We didn’t want abstract concepts.”
It is worth noting though that the winning team was led by
Arup, a global multidisciplinary design consultancy, leading a team
including architects (Sauerbruch Hutton from Germany), service
designers (Experientia from Turin), carbon financing experts and so
— 46 —

on. This in itself was a reversal of traditional practice — usually
architects lead, with Arup as a sub-consultant — and emphasised the
need for a multidisciplinary approach that could produce multiple
strategies. As such, the team was able to design an approach that
matched the strategic ambition of the clients (Sitra, SRV and VVO)
and incorporate numerous strategies, such as those listed above.
(Disclaimer: I was a designer on the Arup team, before “jumping the
fence” to become a designer on the client side at Sitra.)
So the Low2No building is Trojan Horse, a carrier of multiple
strategic outcomes well outside of a traditional building. With the
emphasis on replicability[7]
, each outcome is in effect a different platoon pouring out of
the Trojan Horse, and marching across Finland.[8]
Every building has the potential to be a Trojan Horse — recall
architectural writer Sanford Kwinter’s quote on buildings as “delicate
servo-mechanisms”, which he applied to the Pompidou Centre in
Paris. But most building projects, perhaps forced by the strictures of
the generally non-strategic construction business, are not Trojan
Horses. In fact, Kwinter sees 1977’s Pompidou as the last major
building project that genuinely reflected and actively changed wider
cultural patterns.
Facing the problems we do, it is no longer good for projects to
be one-offs. We must now take advantage of the Trojan Horse
potential implicit within each in order to strategically address our
wider culture. Here, the building project is a fulcrum for addressing a
wider culture of decision-making. As we’ll see, this is then a form of
“bait-and-switch” in which what looks at first like a simple “artefact”
project — like a building — is in fact a way of rethinking and
redistributing the Nordic Model of governance itself.

PLAY #3: THE PLATFORM
Strategic design projects such as Low2No are also conceived of as
platforms.
The platform is perhaps one of the core ideas to have emerged
in the business world in the last decade. Instinctively almost, designing
services for the web has driven this thinking. It is increasingly
commonly understood that the success of Facebook, say, is in its
ability to provide a platform for people to do “whatever they want”
(of course, a simplification) to organise and run their lives, to
calibrate and project their identity in terms that are as intimate as
they like, to built third-party applications with the system via
“applications programming interfaces”.
And yet it’s the exact same codebase, the exact same offering,
shared by 800 million highly diverse users. It’s quite a trick.
Similarly the success of the iPod, and then iPhone, in terms of
media consumption is due to the wider platform in which it sits — the
iTunes, iTunes Music Store, App Store ecosystem. This latter in
particular, in which users can make apps that sit within and upon
Apple’s platform, is key to its success. So Apple does not make the
majority of the content for its users — others make the music, the
movies, the apps — but by enabling and controlling the platform, it
enables and controls the value.
So the particular product or content by itself is not enough; the
wider context as a platform is what makes it sing, what makes it a
success. Karsten Schmidt, the designer behind PostSpectacular, a
London-based design agency, has suggested that contemporary design
practice, primarily embedded within the social, cultural and technical
relationships of the internet, means that we should “think of
everything as a platform.” The platform’s core characteristics —
— 48 —

including, but not limited to, being scalable, replicable, malleable, and
user-centred — have proved to be extraordinarily successful so far.
Yet this platform thinking is not yet common outside of the
web.
Working on a metro project in Sydney, it seemed obvious to use
the same data around the real-time location and behaviour of metro
trains across three or four different devices (installation, multi-touch
interactive map, mobile app, etc). Yet this was relatively radical
thinking for a built environment project — particularly a public
infrastructure project — used to thinking about procuring services for
different spaces as discrete packages, independent of each other. The
way data moves, as a medium in itself, could begin to change the way
we think about such services.
More importantly, it also suggests strategic improvements to
such environments. In articulating the idea of the “coherent user
experience” across multiple devices, one is quickly in a discussion
about a unified approach to service branding and delivery, oriented
around the user, across different modes of transit. This, again, is very
different to the current situation, whereby these different modes of
transit are independent service contracts almost in competition with
each other. So the Sydney Buses “system” doesn’t talk to that of
Sydney Ferries, doesn’t talk to CityRail, doesn’t talk to Metro Light
Rail, and so on.”System” here is used to describe the business, the
organisation, and the resultant service experience, as well as the
technologies of infrastructure.
This may have once made sense from an asset sales and
privatisation point of view, but it didn’t make sense for the user.
Where once this wouldn’t have mattered, this is now thrown into
sharp relief through the possibility of a platform approach to transit
— 49 —

data, influenced by similar platforms such as social media beginning to
run almost everything else.
Designing transit data on a smartphone leads to a total
reconceptualisation of Sydney’s public transport infrastructure.
Matter to meta, product to platform.
With Low2No, the block will be a platform for start-ups in the
incubator spaces, and through Sitra’s presence as a form of
innovation-driven venture capitalist within the same block.
It will be a platform for a new kind of food retail business, for
example. In a reversal of traditional property development practice,
in which a new building is constructed with a “To Let” sign on the
outside, and then absorbs whatever businesses the market can throw at
it, Low2No has started from the principle of “curating” particular
food retail businesses before the building is even designed. Experientia
and Sitra have led participative approaches, in which more organic,
sustainable and local food businesses have been approached to be
potential tenants in Low2No. Through this active curation, tied to
urban agriculture strategies that are designed into the built fabric,
Low2No becomes a platform for a new kind of food culture in the
city.
With “smart city” systems, the building produces and publishes
data about its performance in real-time, enabling others to build
visualisations, apps and other artefacts using that data. This is
perhaps the most obvious sense of platform, but also draws additional
value to the block, over and above the typical building project.
These strategies are lifted from the context of web design and
introduces them to policy and planning contexts where such practice
is still rare, never mind common. There are numerous characteristics
that define the successful “platform play” — this essay won’t dwell
— 50 —

on them, as they can be readily found elsewhere, perhaps most
usefully in Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (2010).
As The Edge case study illustrates, the shift between matter and
meta, working on some traditional output of design practice yet with
strategic or systemic effects as a further goal, describes some of the
core characteristics of strategic design. Yet the design practice and
business strategy of the platform also has this zooming effect at its
core.
Here, the particular product or service has to be realised in detail
in order to derive network and platform effects once it achieves
critical mass. So Apple’s iTunes has to work in terms of some core
system functionality — managing files, playing media, payment and
account handling, and so on. Yet iTunes becomes a platform through
strategic licensing deals that enables the file management system to
become the primary store for digital content, and incorporation into
other hardware and software platforms that are part of a coherent,
almost seamless system of “content experience”.
At this point, such a service can enable a systemic change — by
2009, iTunes was responsible for over 25% of all music sales in the
US; in just a few years, it had removed a huge chunk of the physical
record store sector, which had been around for almost a century.
Note the symbiotic relationship, though: without the attention-
to-detail required in executing high-quality interaction design or
industrial design, for example, the strategic elements will not be
realised; without the strategic alliances opening up the platform, the
particular products and services will not be used enough.
Whether the designer is at the core of the business strategy or
not, one has to be intimately aware when designing of how a system
works on both scales and at all points in-between; to understand the
pixel and the platform.
— 51 —

It could be argued that the good architect likewise has to be
aware of the detailing on a door handle as well as a building’s
relationship with the wider system of built fabric, community and
infrastructure it sits within, whether that’s a log cabin on the edge of a
forest or an apartment block in a dense urban core. Similarly, a
particular breed of industrial designer is simultaneously aware of the
curve of an electric car’s wheel arch and how it might suggest a new
infrastructure of charging points rather than filling stations.
Each of these suggests that a strategic element to design can be
entertained as a core part of design practice. Some aspects of design
have drawn this scaling between meta and matter out more than
others, and sometimes simply through the proclivities of a particular
designer or design firm.
This feature is common to design processes and design-led
organisations, though not necessarily unique to designers or present in
all designers. Norman Foster reflected on working with Apple’s Steve
Jobs recently:
“He encouraged us to develop new ways of looking at design
to reflect his unique ability to weave backwards and forwards
between grand strategy and the minutiae of the tiniest of
internal fittings. For him no detail was small in its significance
and he would be simultaneously questioning the headlines of
our project together while he delved into its fine print.“
(Norman Foster
, 2011)
With Low2No, the development of the “smart city” services
layer as a platform implies that similar code, similar interfaces — and
ideally interchangeable data — can be developed for other blocks at
Jätkäsaari, as well as at other urban renewal projects elsewhere in
Helsinki, such as Kalasatama and Arabianranta, and ultimately
combine to form a smart city platform for Helsinki and beyond. It’s
— 52 —

not only easy to imagine how a building-based service might replicate,
and gain in value as a result of a greater network, but it’s actually
imperative to build in replicability with a platform-based service for it
to succeed. As with the development of Twitter, it could be seen that
Low2No starts to materialise first as an applications programming
interface, rather than wood, glass and concrete.
Returning to the fire codes issue, a traditional approach would
have been for a new timber building, which would be an exception, to
warrant an associated exception being made in terms of building
regulations. Yet an exception does not enable systemic replicability; it
only enables one instance — the exception. So the strategy was to
change the general fire code permanently; that would enable other
buildings to follow after Low2No.
Even the architecture itself was designed to be replicable to
some degree.
This is not common in building projects, as there is usually no
financial incentive contained within the business model to justify it.
This is not a question of technology or architectural qualities, but of
business model and cultural attitudes. For Low2No to try to break this
mould was tough. As noted, the smart systems layer is far easier to
understand in terms of replicability, partly due to the relative lack of
“matter” involved ie a smart services layer. Building on
contemporary urban informatics thinking, smart services are
integrated into physical matter to some extent — in terms of
apartment fittings, lobby spaces and building façades — but the bulk
of it exists as digital media, and so is innately transferable. It is also a
medium in which platform-thinking is, if not inherent or mandatory,
well understood and at the core of most business models. By
positioning smart services at the core of Low2No however, we have a
— 53 —

chance to “infect” the built environment business with some of this
thinking.
The challenge is to draw platform thinking into other areas of
public life, including built artefacts and physical services where
appropriate, in order to unleash its associated systemic effects outside
of digitally mediated environments or contexts. For example, what
would a platform for local, public cultures of decision-making look
like?
PLAY #4: THE LAYER
The additional benefits of prototyping, in the context of governance
or public-service culture, are that they provide a way of moving
forward in the first place, through activity that generates learning
(analysis) and human-centred system design as a side-effect of doing
something (synthesis). A prototype suggests a way of mitigating risk,
through iterative approaches, while delivering ambitious change — it
enables the platform and policy to develop structurally, finding a way
to move free of the straitjacket of over-analysis and over-
consultation.
But the strategic platform and policy cannot be a prototype in
toto, just as public service is too important to be a prototype. There
is a danger in describing projects overall as prototypes, in that it
suggests they are in some way “not real”, that they can be turned off,
decommissioned. Strategic projects such as Low2No must be beyond
mere prototyping, or “showcases of sustainable living”. It must be a
real block, with real inhabitants living and working in it, as it is the
foundations upon which the subsequent or associated strategies sit.
Remove the foundations, and the whole strategic edifice might
crumble. More broadly, public administration was invented to provide
security, stability and certainty, after all.
— 54 —

Jocelyne Bourgon, who has 40 years experience of Canadian
public service, effortlessly sums up this dilemma:
“How do we ensure that public institutions designed for
stability, predictability and compliance can also improve the
capacity to anticipate, innovate and introduce proactive
interventions in a timely way when the collective interest
demands it?” (Jocelyne Bourgon, 2011)
Thinking about what elements of a platform can be prototyped
can be informed by understanding layers — of a policy, of a
governance structure, of a prototype artefact — and the differing
pace of change at each. This idea of adaptive layers is drawn from
Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn (1994). Ironically, this
book has had made little difference to architecture, where its anti-
modernist invective was aimed, albeit with highly variable accuracy,
but has been highly influential in internet-based platform thinking,
interaction design and software development.
Brand sees structures comprising different layers that shear
against each other at different paces, and sees an adaptive structure as
one that enables this “slippage” between differently paced systems,
such that a structure “learns” and improves over time.

“O therwise slow sy stems block the flow of the quick ones, and the quick ones
tear up the slow ones with their constant change.” (Brand, 1994)
This provides an insight into how to design platforms, with core
services moving slowly while faster layers enable experimentation and
learning through prototyping. How to apply this to governance and
cultures of decision-making? Brand moved his layers diagram beyond
buildings to culture, seeing governance as a layer within a global
— 56 —

system of shearing layers. “Shearing and slipping” in this context
describe a form of information exchange.
Similarly, Steven Johnson has written about the generative
platform’s reliance on the idea of stacked layers, or “platform
stacks”, in which cultural and scientific development, as well as the
internet, rely on a form of strata of informational exchanges
(Johnson, 2010).
— 57 —

But what if this entire system of fast and slow layers was
overlaid on to government? In Fast Strategy, Mikko Kosonen and
Yves Doz describe their notion of strategic agility in terms of
possessing “an ongoing capability for real-time strategic sensitivity,
quick collective commitments, and fast and strong resource
redeployment”.
Agility is a good word in this context, as opposed to say
“speed”. Government is often characterised as being too slow, but
speed should not be a driver in itself. It could be that we need a form
of slow government, predicated on a similar idea of slowness that
underpins the slow-food movement: valuing craft, provenance,
attention to detail, shared responsibility, while creating a platform for
dialogue and community through human-centredness. A fast, “push-
button democracy” might well be the last thing we need.
Equally, there are areas of public service where the language and
practice of prototyping and “fast layers” has to be developed with
care. When the sector is healthcare, or some other area of public
service where lives are at risk, it’s clear that the threshold for
experimentation has to be tighter, and the slow pace of change of
some layers can be an advantage. Although it happens, it should not
be the case that peoples’ lives can be put at risk through an approach
that preferences iteration — “it will get better” — over safeguards.
This idea of fast and slow layers can then be used to frame the
discussion of risk within a system, with some layers slower and
careful, and others more agile, more exploratory. Seeing the layers as
linked — from policy to delivery, from system to product or service
— albeit slipping fluidly against each other — also suggests a platform
approach that intrinsically enables learning, and thus closes the policy
gap described earlier. User-centredness, another core value in
contemporary design, can be layered across this system too, with
— 58 —

exterior layers of the platform more participative than slower, more
strategic “internal” layers. The faster layers can pivot with greater
flexibility, over time altering the slower layers conceptually beneath,
their intended plasticity dictating how much and how quickly their
“shape memory” can be rewritten. Again, this is zooming from
matter to meta and back again.
All this would usefully reorient “problems” with risk,
uncertainty and complexity through iterative development and wider
systems thinking. It requires a comfort with complexity and “out-of-
control systems” that is not exactly a natural fit with public-sector
culture at this point.
However, it is increasingly common in business. Arup’s Tristram
Carfrae has suggested the value of wallowing in complexity, of being
entirely absorbed within a problem space, feeling your way around
through exploration and projection, rather than trying to stand back
and objectively survey or predict a route through. This has an
inadvertent echo of Potter’s “advice for beginners” in his What is a
Designer:
“If you climb on top of a job, trying to master it, the work will
suffocate. Let it take you, play with it, search for its own life.”
(Norman Potter
, 1969)
This exploration is also evocative of current thinking at the
edge of business practice. Writing in the business magazine Forbes,
Haydn Shaughnessy describes General Electric’s $100 million
investment in cancer care through a social-innovation approach,
based on Michael Porter’s notion of “shared value”. The language is
peppered with “building ecosystems”, “shared platforms”, and
systems deliberately exploring a space that is ill-defined through “a
business process (that) appears vague when compared to traditional
$100 million investments”.
— 59 —

Hill Dan - Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary.pdf

Hill Dan - Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary.pdf

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Hill Dan - Dark matter and trojan horses. A strategic design vocabulary.pdf