Strategic design research: Co-designing organizational transformation from within

Abstract

In this article, we discuss and argue for the value of working with strategic design in organizational settings through inventive research practices rooted in co-design and design anthropology. More specifically, we propose a process of collaborative experimentation staged as a series of events that establish relations between everyday organizational perspectives and practices and organizational strategic documents. We base our analytical discussions and reflections on a research project carried out in the organizational setting of a labour union. We describe how a programme‐experiment informed design research approach, driven by and reliant on collaborative explorations, provides a scaffold for unlocking organizational strategic management visions and goals in interaction with transformational perspectives on organizational practices. We frame our approach as a research strategy of working ‘from within’ the organizational setting, which focuses on staging dialogues between the experimental and the managerial. Such a disposition, we argue, offers important alternatives to management literatures’ current approaches to strategic design research.