Recipes for Systemic Change - Helsinki Design Lab

Strategic Design25To cope with the compound uncertainty of lacking a clearstrategy but being ‘on the hook’ for very specific and concretedecisions, many designers have developed ways of working toclarify inputs and outputs, problem and solution, opportunityand ambition, in tandem.This nonlinear way of working often remains hiddeninside a ‘black box’ and can therefore be mysterious. Throughour work in strategic design we are attempting to demystifysome of these ways of working so as to make them moreaccessible and useful in contexts outside traditional designtasks.A Third CultureThis term was coined to describe the characteristics typicalof children growing up between cultures 3 (for example achild of Finnish parents, growing up in Spain). The idea ofa third culture that bridges differences can also be appliedto institutional divides, such as our schools and universities,which are often divided into two distinct parts, thesciences and the humanities. 4 Taking a closer look at wheredepartments of design and architecture physically sit revealsevidence of an ongoing struggle to make sense of what designhas to offer.Sometimes designers share a building with engineers,while other times they are collocated with fine arts. Onlyoccasionally do the design departments exist on their own,separate from both the humanities and the sciences. Perhapsthe difficulty is that design combines some aspects of bothand therefore could legitimately be considered a Third Cultureof knowledge.As a way of working and thinking, design sits betweenthe two poles of science, which observes the facts of thematerial world, and the humanities, which interprets thecomplexities of human experience. Design takes a middlepath and is primarily concerned with appropriateness,understood as that fragile quality which is achieved when thebest of human intentions are realized within the constraintsof reality. 5 Design is a culture that blends the concerns ofscience and the humanities to search for outcomes that arebalanced and opportunistic, grounded in the real world butdriven by human aspirations. It is equally concerned withprobing the limits of our current reality as it is with makingnew realities possible. Lately within the design professions,3—“Third Culture Kids” is a term coined byRuth Hill Useem in the 1960’s to describe thecharacteristics of children who have grownup in a multicultural and mobile environment.“The third culture kid builds relationshipsto [multiple] cultures, while not having fullownership in any” from ‘Third Culture Kids:Growing Up Among Worlds’ by David C. Pollockand Ruth E. Van Reken4—See C.P. Snow’s Rede Lecture as publishedin ‘The Two Cultures’ and Immanuel Wallerstein’s‘World Systems Analysis: An Introduction’for more on this understanding of humanknowledge.5—Cross, Nigel. ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing’.p. 18