Strategic Design Research Journal

Editorial

2025-07-14T17:03:59-03:00

This issue of SDRJ features articles from diverse locations, reflecting a rich variety of perspectives on strategic design. Amid this diversity, several key themes emerge, offering significant contributions to the strategic design community. Accordingly, this issue explores the agency of more-than-human in circular ecosystems, the linguistic dimensions of an Amazonian design reference, Advanced Design as an approach to digital culture, Boundary Objects in relation to strategic design, a reflection on the Post-Anthropocene transition, and a reflection on the designer’s engagement between Japanese organizations.

Relational Frictions in Circular Economy Ecosystems: Designing for Transformative Futures

2025-05-07T08:03:28-03:00

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.

Printed Amazon: the Creation in Surface Design from Cultural References

2024-05-28T15:24:35-03:00

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.

RADICI: Prototyping Trans-sectoral Ecosystems in Digital Cultural Heritage

2025-05-02T14:51:42-03:00

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.

Strategic Design as a Boundary Object [transformative] Social Innovation:

2024-11-16T18:40:10-03:00

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.

Data or Design First? Rethinking the Roles and Challenges of Designers in the era of Data-Centric Artificial Intelligence

2024-05-28T15:11:45-03:00

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.

BioDiveIn + GoCoLife:

2024-06-05T09:20:11-03:00

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.

Understanding Designer Engagement in the Product Development Process:

2025-06-04T22:08:08-03:00

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.